Our thinking about software is shaped by basic assumptions and metaphors that we rarely question. Computer science has the term science in its very name; we think of programming languages as formal mathematical objects and we hope to make better software by treating it as an engineering discipline. Those perspectives enabled a wide range of useful developments, but I believe they have outlived their usefulness. We need new ways of thinking about software that are able to cope with ill-defined problems and the increasing complexity of software. In this essay, I draw a parallel between the world of software and the world of architecture, design and urban planning. I hope to convince the reader that this is a well-justified parallel and I point to a number of discussions in architecture, design and urban planning from which the software world could learn. What kind of software may we be able to build if we think of programming as a design problem and aim to create navigable and habitable software for all its users?

Tomas is a Lecturer at University of Kent and a Collaborating Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London. He is building programming tools that integrate with modern data sources (open government data, data published by citizen initiatives) and let users easily create analyses and visualizations that are linked to the original data source, making the analyses more transparent, reproducible, but also easy to adapt. His early work on the project can be found at http://thegamma.net.

Tomas’ many other interests include open-source and functional programming (he is an active contributor to the F# ecosystem), programming language theory (his PhD thesis on “coeffects” develops a theory of context-aware programming language language), but also understanding programming through the perspective of philosophy of science.