ISSEC 2013 Book of Abstracts (Sept. 2013) | Page 20

Wednesday, 18 September 2013 9:00 – 9:30 KEYNOTE:
From Computer Science to Software Engineering – a programming-level perspective. Paul Bailes Professor of Computer Science Deputy President, Academic Board The University of Queensland
An important distinction between “science” and “engineering” is that while the former is broadly constrained by some kind of “scientific method”, the latter is relatively tightly-constrained by discipline-specific practices and techniques. One implication for the evolution of computer science into genuine software engineering is that its programming-level component needs to embrace significantly more constrained programming languages than hitherto. A practical model of how this can be achieved is provided by the systematic replacement of general iterative constructs by a hierarchy of recursion patterns, the advantages of which include potentially simpler education, comprehension and even verification. This proposition echoes the “structured programming” debate of over forty years ago, but has wider ramifications including a repudiation of what might be termed the “Turing view” of programming based on interpretation of symbolic data. The theoretical foundations of the recursion pattern hierarchy also suggests Category Theory as the mathematical basis for software engineering

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