Components: What If They Gave a Revolution and Nobody Came?

T here have been three great revolutions in computing technology during the past 50 years: the stored-program computer, high-level languages, and component-level programming. Although working programmers are well aware of this last revolution, it seems to have escaped the notice of most everyone else. Academic researchers are doing little or nothing that touches the subject, and apart from trade journals and magazines aimed at developers, publishers have all but ignored it. Yet, when we speak of component-level programming, we are not speaking of the future. The revolution has already happened, and in the academic community, nobody came.