7 /10 1 Votes
Cover artist Bruce Kenselaar Media type Print (Hardback) ISBN 0-13-203670-3 Originally published 1992 Publisher Prentice Hall OCLC 25281663 | 3.5/5 Goodreads Publication date 1992 Pages 352 (first edition) Dewey Decimal 005.1 20 Country United States of America | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Followed by Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer Similar Edward Yourdon books, Software books, Software engineering books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Decline and Fall of the American Programmer is a book written by Edward Yourdon in 1992. It was addressed to American programmers and software organizations of the 1990s, warning that they were about to be driven out of business by programmers in other countries who could produce software more cheaply and with higher quality. Yourdon claimed that American software organizations could only retain their edge by using technologies such as ones he described in the book. (These are listed in the chapter outline below.) Yourdon gave examples of how non-American — specifically Indian and Japanese — companies were making use of these technologies to produce high-quality software.
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In the follow-up book Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer, published in 1996, Yourdon reversed some of his original predictions based upon changes in the state of the software industry.