Time-Oriented Programming

Advances in embedded system software, including event and data based computation models, high-level simulation and analysis, concurrent programming concepts, and real time scheduling, can take decades to have a significant impact on practice. A key barrier to adoption of new techniques is the tendency for engineers to fall back to their first-learned techniques. Such tendencies are ubiquitous, and explains in part why, for example, soda and fast food companies pay American high-schools to allow on-campus sales (thus increasing the odds that those students will fall back to consuming those products as adults), as well as in engineers preferring the text editors, operating systems, and programming languages learned in college. More importantly, the entire perspective of software development formed in college tends to serve as the means by which an engineer understands and assimilates future techniques; changing that perspective can take many years. For example, early introduction of objects via object-oriented programming can, some argue, encourage engineers to give more importance to organization than to algorithms and thus enhance the ability to build large complex software projects.