> In my revisionist history, software engineering began when programs got too big to see the whole thing on one screen and intuitively understand.
Laughing, politely, at that summary of "history." Software engineering started when there were no screens. Code was written on typewriters (called "terminals") and then printed to cards or long rolls of paper (and occasionally using switches to indicate the 1's and 0's you wanted set as bits in your code). Before the Mac a "screen" of code was pretty universally 24 lines of green or white text on a black background, 80 monospace characters per line. A few specialized terminals had 25x80 so they could show a status line below the 24x80 standard area, but they were rare beasts. Yes, there were a few systems like Plato that predated the Mac but if you need a tl;dr it's the observation that, like most revisionist histories, this one is unfortunately total nonsense when looked at in the context of actual history (even if lots of people who didn't experience the actual history believe it).
Quite agreed, and it's why I deliberately chose the "revisionist" label.
Before screens, there were pages, before pages there were cards... going back to plugboards, etc.
Each of us got in at a certain time point. When I learned programming, we had a workstation that simulated a card punch, let you see the contents of one card at a time on a little vacuum-fluorescent display, and stored the data on an 8" floppy. You handed the floppy to the computer operator, and received a printout on green-bar paper.
The other way I got into "programming" was staring at a nest of wires, reading my output on an oscilloscope, and making corrections with a soldering iron. ;-)
The common theme was that a program gets too large for somebody to look at and understand it, much less for a team to work on it all at once, unless disciplines are adopted that tend to come from software engineering. When I'm mentoring colleagues who are just beginning to get into scientific programming, some of these simple techniques, such as avoiding globals and creating functions, are in fact an improvement.
It sounds like instead of putting the sentence in past tense and calling it a revisionist history it sounds like what you are really doing is making a present tense generalization based on years of historical observation: software engineering begins when the code gets too big to see the whole thing on one screen and intuitively understand (aka Analog31's law)
Laughing, politely, at that summary of "history." Software engineering started when there were no screens. Code was written on typewriters (called "terminals") and then printed to cards or long rolls of paper (and occasionally using switches to indicate the 1's and 0's you wanted set as bits in your code). Before the Mac a "screen" of code was pretty universally 24 lines of green or white text on a black background, 80 monospace characters per line. A few specialized terminals had 25x80 so they could show a status line below the 24x80 standard area, but they were rare beasts. Yes, there were a few systems like Plato that predated the Mac but if you need a tl;dr it's the observation that, like most revisionist histories, this one is unfortunately total nonsense when looked at in the context of actual history (even if lots of people who didn't experience the actual history believe it).