I would adore the opportunity to witness the state of software some billions of computer-years in the future, as Darwin did with evolution. The chance to see what has happened and pontificate on how it may have got here from there. This isn't what Darwin did. He did something unusual.

I managed to catch a lecture to the Royal Society by Sir Tim Berners-Lee recently. He achieved something of similar stature to Darwin. He changed the current locked-in mindset towards a nirvana-like route to a better world of universal connectivity. From his deep knowledge of the past he surmised that designing a communications system out of totally open components and standards would enable unheard of developments. He didn't invent the Internet, he did something unusual.

Both Sir Charles Darwin and Sir Tim Berners-Lee took the time to look back on what was past and by selecting that which was clearly relevant, along with some amazing insight, discovered a pattern, judged where we are now and, in doing so, changed the future.

Let us start something here! I hope to emulate their achievements collectively, through shared wisdom and experience. I hope to describe where we are now, selecting only the surviving factors, perceive one or more patterns, and make some future predictions that may guide us all on the next step.

The Past

The primordial soup of software was, without doubt, binary logic. It is still with us in everything we do and even permeates the gaps between how some of us think. Will it be a guiding force for the future? Sure, it's predictable and therefore comfortable in the micro sense but it cannot be applied in a reasonable time span to modern systems so where is its value? It has its place at the micro level used by compilers and coders.

Structured programming; our second attempt at predictability. It works, with the smaller parts (on a systems scale). Use it to make sure you've freed all allocated memory or closed all opened files but let us keep it in its place! It so regularly bogs you down in deciding where to put the plaster (band-aid) when you have to break the rules. It's a tool like the rest, applicable, but in its place at the coding level.

Objects! A predictability and visualization tool. We can now encode methods and properties of objects and help the object be secret about implementation in the interest of portability. Objects bring visualization, structure, portability, reuse and morphing. OOP currently stands head and shoulders above the rest of the structuring techniques for 'benefit to the future'. A software architect's dream tool while still deeply effective for programmers.

Then there are the design methods. Design by committee, design by massage, design by evolution, design by mantra, top down design, inside-out design, bottom up design, design by slapdash, design by finger-in-the-air, design by financial benefit, design by sales team, some good, some awful. The best architects use their own concoction that is a selection of the best of each that meets the requirements of the current project. Some good tools for the systems architect, some for the programmer, some for the coder, some even for the business.

Documentation; another huge field. There are design methods that formalize the documentation and documentation methods that drive the design. There are coding methods that document themselves and documentation languages that attempt to write the code. There are even languages that provide inheritance facilities to the documentation. Lets face it, documentation is here to stay because however good the code, some dullard will one day need to change it.

When devices became programmable, software turned into an orchestra of independent components with disparate communications protocols and questionable reliability. Each component had as many issues as before but now we have all the protocols to contend with, each of them either unique or a hobble to the harmonious cooperation of the whole. Grid computing is wallowing in a mire of financial design methods.

Patterns are doing for architecture what structure did for coding. This will grow as fast as we can nail down the patterns themselves.

It popped up two weeks ago just after my deadline, but the people at Sophos posted an article that says that the Sober-N virus is responsible for 4.5 per cent of the email being sent worldwide. A truly mindboggling number; that means that at least ten of the emails in my inbox each morning were sent by it.

Symantec says that even a week later, the threat is still wild. It comes with the usual attachment, and it looks like an offer for free tickets to the World Cup soccer tournament in Germany.

I know there's a joke in here somewhere: two other viruses were announced by Sophos last week as well. One uses a link that claims that British Prime Minister Tony Blair's email has been hacked; it installs a trojan and password stealer. The other includes a picture of a rare albino gorilla in a zipped file.

Last week, it was the US ISPs that came under the gun; now, the anti-spam group SPEWS has blacklisted Telewest, the provider that operates the popular blueyonder.co.uk domain. According to SPEWS, about 17,000 Telewest customers are spamming, but the block affects all 900,000 of blueyonder subscribers.

I'm not sure I like this much. Google released its Web Accelerator in beta form last week, but a quick look at the terms of use say, "If you enter personally identifiable information (such as an email address) onto a form on an unencrypted web page, some sites may send this information through Google. Whenever your computer sends cookies with browsing or prefetching page requests for unencrypted sites, we temporarily cache these cookies in order to improve performance." Knowing that Google keeps cached pages for a long time, just what do they mean by "temporarily"? The company has taken the GWA down as of last Wednesday, saying that it had reached its capacity of users.

I know I don't like this much. The Transportation Safety Administration is now going to start asking for yet more information when you buy an airline ticket. You don't actually have to give it to them, but it does mean they'll be more likely to go through your luggage at the airport.