第9章ソフトウェア工学

People have vastly different opinions as to what software engineering will be like twenty or thirty years into the future. One day, revolutionary discovery or invention may change our society in a radical way—or not. Nobody can predict when or what specific scientific breakthroughs will happen, and discoveries can shape our future in ways that are hard to imagine today. Based on our experience of the past twenty or more years, however, we can make some predictions about where software engineering may be in 2040.

We can, for example, predict that the evolution of current programming languages will be driven by changes in hardware and that the tools developers use will improve. But with the evolution of AI and machine learning, will software developers become obsolete? Under current circumstances, the answer is no. AI can, however, help with some developer’s tasks, such as testing, debugging, and refactoring. While we can expect that intelligent bots will be members of development teams, they will not fully replace software developers.

Now let’s discuss three questions about the future of software development:

1. What programming languages will we use? We can expect that current programming languages will evolve, perhaps even become obsolete, by 2040, but it is hard to imagine that languages like Java, Python, C, C#, and C++ will disappear entirely because there is so much code written in these programming languages.

2. Can we get to the point where all software is written, and we do not need any software development? Absolutely not in the near future. We are not at the end nor in the middle of a technology revolution—we are at the beginning. The importance of software in society will grow, and software systems will become more sophisticated. For example, with the Internet of Things (IoT), we will connect thousands and thousands of smart devices to the Internet, and they all will need software.

3. Does it make sense to learn programming today? Absolutely. With the increased use of smart, connected devices, the integration of technology is getting more rather than less prevalent in almost all facets of life, and technology continues to offer an advantage to businesses to operate quicker, better, and more effectively than the competition. Given this, software development will become more important.

Additionally, electronics (including computer hardware) and the way computer programming is applied continue to evolve. In the early 2000s, mobile computing and Wi-Fi connectivity changed the way computing happened. In the past decade, connectivity continued to evolve, and many new types of smart devices needed new code. Over the next few decades, changes in the core of computers, such as the creation of quantum coprocessors, have the potential to revolutionize software development yet again.

In 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted that over the next decade, the number software engineering jobs in the United States will increase by 25%⁸ . This is, in part, because technology continues to infiltrate our daily lives. For example, many grocery chains are updating their shopping carts to include sensors that record all of the items you add to the basket area. As this automation continues and expands, it will require a lot of software developers. The current push for autonomous vehicles will be accomplished as a result of sensors and a large number of software engineers creating hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It will take years of testing, debugging, and refactoring before autonomous vehicles are as commonly accepted as a mobile phone is today. It will be software engineers who make that happen.

8 Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers, at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm (visited June 04, 2023).