Decline and Fall of the American Programmer

Über

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. Yourdon gave examples of how non-American — specifically Indian and Japanese — companies were making use of these technologies to produce high-quality software.
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.