This is in response to a question asked on Fora Is there a “ceiling” in Software engineering? Why?

Software developers hit a Glass Ceiling because software development itself has hit a glass ceiling. Software development has failed to figure out how to work with information directly inside a computer program. Instead, we work with data rather than information. We have left the information work to the BI, data analytics, data mining, knowledge representation world. This world works with data after the fact to extract information from it.

What if programmers could work with information inside a program? before the fact. The next level of development could be to work with information as well as data inside a program. The glass ceiling is that we generally can not work with information. An entire new industry development effort needs to get started developing tools and techniques for doing this. I am doing my little bit to break through this glass ceiling at my blog. I also provide libraries for the techniques so far developed. But we need much more than a few techniques that one software developer can create, God willing. We need an industry push to break through the glass ceiling and build the entire information level of software development. Let’s get started!