Lambda the Ultimate

For whatever reason, I can't help but continually muse over the myriad unfulfilled promises generated by the software engineering, research and development communities over the past few decades plus, the duration of my own involvement.

Coming out of Boston in the mid-to-late '80's, there's a veritable laundry list of AI and then OOP associated promises of software heaven as yet unfulfilled. I think of the "formal methodologies" craze going back to the early 70's and my father's day up through, say, the earlier part of this decade. (While I do anachronistically find Jackson's now "outdated" books still full of well written problem solving wisdom, I don't see so many flowcharts, or object hierarchy, or object state or data flow diagrams these days.) And on a very related note, whatever became of the relatively bright promise of software construction via specification, and (IMHO) relatively lovely specification notations such as Z?

Whatever came of Gelertner's vision of massive, distributed tuple spaces, (or Jini for that matter) fronted by advanced data visualization on every desktop? Where are our catalogs, commercial or otherwise, of plugable "software components?" Why is "SETI at Home," of all the possible application domains, still probably the best known and most widely disseminated example of massively distributed computing (if I have my terminology right)?

And on and on .... So I'm very curious. What are the unfulfilled software technology promises most noteworthy to LTU members? And just as important, which of these were but ill conceived pipe dreams? But at the same time, which of these promises of yore might still warrant fulfillment with further time, effort and research?

Scott