1.6 Why professions change their names
People once called this work programming. As software grew more consequential, the name stopped covering the responsibility, and what was called programming became software engineering. Margaret Hamilton, who led the team that built the Apollo guidance software, championed and helped popularize the term — it has earlier uses, and the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference is part of the same history — to insist that software work deserved the same seriousness as any other engineering discipline.9 Software engineering did not make programmers obsolete; it gave a larger body of work a name, and programming became one part of that practice.
Orchestrator is the next inflection point from software engineering. It does not announce the end of programming or of software engineering; it names a scope of responsibility becoming visible around them — the development and governance of systems that can propose work, carry it out, and alter the process itself.
Maia Weinstock, “Margaret Hamilton’s Apollo Code,” MIT News Office, August 17, 2016, republished by NASA Science at https://science.nasa.gov/people/margaret-hamilton/ (original: https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apollo-code-0817). NASA identifies Hamilton as leader of the Software Engineering Division at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory and credits her with popularizing the concept of software engineering.↩︎