SOFSEM 2001 28th Annual Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Informatics November 24 - December 1, 2001 Piestany, Slovak Republic, Europe

Software geography: its principal physical and economic aspects

by Vaughan Pratt

To the metaphors of software engineering and software physics can be added that of software geography. We examine the physical and economic aspects of the Software Glacier (once an innocent bubbling brook, now a vast frozen mass of applications imperceptibly shaping both the Hardware Shelf below and User City above, with crevasses that open up without warning), the Verification and Quantum Planets (colonization of either could be fruitful if and when it becomes practical), the Union of Types, Objects and Java (a promising coalition of young states in the warm south), the Great Wall of Security (locking out the growing menace of the Hacker Hordes raiding from the south), and Concurrency Frontier (an inaccessible land with rich resources that we project will be exploited to profound economic effect during the next half-century). The speaker presently commutes between the first and last of these at respectively Tiqit Computers and Stanford University.