Software Engineering Past, Present, And Future With Grady Booch
Oxide and Friends, Saturday, February 7th, 2026
Bryan and Adam were joined by Grady Booch, software engineering pioneer and living legend, to speak about the past present and future of software engineering. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme!
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest, Grady Booch.
- Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them (some LLM assistance):
- SAGE as foundational real-time distributed system
- Software crisis demand outpaced ability to build reliable systems
- Margaret Hamilton (SAGE & Apollo) and the term 'software engineering'
- UML
- Rational Software founded (1982); acquired by IBM (2003)
- OO overshot via inheritance; core idea (objects as cognitive units) endured
- LLMs are unreliable narrators - they cannot do abductive reasoning
- Architecture = decisions with high cost of change
- Core skills persist: abstraction, coupling, cohesion, judgment
- Fear cycles repeat; fundamentals endure
Grady Booch is an American software engineer, best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language (UML) with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. He is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software architecture, software engineering, and collaborative development environments.