Hardware Podcasts

Software Engineering Past, Present, and Future with Grady Booch

Oxide and Friends · 7 Feb 2026 · 54m · Episode 3

What this episode covers

Grady Booch, software engineering pioneer and co-founder of Rational Software, joins Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to trace the history and future of software engineering. Booch details the evolution from the 'software crisis' of the 1970s and the creation of UML to the current 'third golden age' driven by distributed systems and LLMs. He argues that while LLMs are powerful tools for increasing abstraction, they are architecturally incapable of abductive reasoning and require experienced engineers to guide them, emphasizing that fundamentals like coupling, cohesion, and judgment remain essential.

Most relevant to

established companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Rational Software, IBM, Microsoft
Also
UML, SAGE, Apollo 11, Margaret Hamilton, Bill Gates, Claude, ZFS, Lua

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