It’s amazing how what was considered humour a few years ago suddenly becomes a working reality today.

In a December 2003 session in Edinburgh, Scotland, Martin Fowler discussed the subject of “the code is the design”, and made reference to Jack Reeves article What is Software Design? Basically, Martin stated that the most accurate form of design documentation that you have for your application is the code itself.

If you’re a first year university student, you can probably relate to this: write code first, then make the “design documentation” fit the code you’ve just written; voila, the code reflects the design.

Anyway, I was clearing out some 15-year old files and came across some interesting photocopies. Here’s the best one:

How prophetic. Assuming that we take “Software Specifications” on its own, we’re not far off the statement the code is the design…

“Nice” highlighting feature courtesy of Microsoft PowerPoint 2003.

Now, I reckon there might be some copyright issues here, however since I never saw/owned the original book that this was published in, I can’t make reference to it. I’ve left the page footer logo in place, hopefully somebody might recognise it.