Socially Responsible Software Development (Teaching Software Design Systematically)

A Software Design Tech Talk presented by Matthias Felleisen on 2023-02-23. Hosted by Google’s Software Design Education team. ABSTRACT: Software is a message from one developer to other developers across time. As such, developing software incurs a social debt to all those developers who will touch this software in the future---be that an older version of the original creator or someone who isn’t even born yet. Understood this way, software development poses two challenges: (1) companies must learn to identify people who understand this idea, because being able to “grind leetcode“ doesn’t qualify; (2) colleges must create alternative programming curricula to turn students into apprentice developers, because the traditional curriculum doesn’t. This talk will present my answer to the second challenge. I have spent the last 25 years creating undergraduate programming courses that are all about software-as-a-message, and the talk will provide an overview of this alternative curriculum approach. The first challenge remains yours to overcome. About the Speaker: Matthias Felleisen Matthias Felleisen is Trustee Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University. He is also a Fellow of the ACM, received the organization’s Karl Karlstrom Award for his work on curriculum development, and was honored with the ACM SIGPLAN Lifetime Award for his research on programming languages.