A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
September 7th, 2026
Welcome to the 96th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Software Factories. In this edition, Graham makes us realize that you cannot get rid of programmers; Adrian is dismayed reviewing the history of Software Factories; in our Vidéothèque section, we listen to Damon Edwards tell us the story of how the DevOps movement got started; and in the Library section, we review "MDA Explained", "Aspect-Oriented Software Development with Use Cases", and "Science of Software Product Lines".
by Graham Lee
Almost since the dawn of programming (certainly since before the 1969 NATO Science Committee conference on software engineering techniques), software managers have been looking for ways to create programs without relying on programmers. In addition to being expensive to hire (at least if you are not asking about salaries in the direct aftermath of 1970s energy crisis, the dot-com crash, the Great Recession, or the post-COVID layoffs bubble), programmers have a habit of doing the wrong thing.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski
One of the oldest and wettest dreams of managers since the invention of the computer has been that of getting rid of that pesky layer of human programmers in their organizations. A lot has been written about the psychology of programmers, about how to deal with them as human beings, and about how the dialog between managers and programmers is broken. Evidence shows that neither developers nor managers are interested in knowing how to deal with one another, and hence, managers have tried again and again to promote themselves into a programmer-free world.
DevOps is, by far, the closest thing we have to a software factory at the time of this writing. We had dedicated a whole issue to DevOps in January 2020, but this month's topic makes it a natural object of interest. The analogy goes so deep that even the word "pipeline" fits into the world of DevOps like a glove.
I guarantee you have used software that is the output of a Software Product Line. If you have got an Android phone, tablet, or audio player; use Linux on your desktop, laptop, set-top box, smart home device, Wi-fi router, server, or cloud computing provider; or you use a web application that is hosted on Linux, then you have used a Linux kernel. Not the Linux kernel, as there are many Linux kernels.
The library of a programmer who has been in the craft for a few decades is a wonderful thing. Although the consumption patterns have somewhat shifted from paper to electronic books, there is always room on their shelf for those forgotten books that represent ideas from another age. This Library entry is just a reminder that those ideas had some value and were interesting in their own, even if the market itself decided otherwise.
