The decade 1980–1989 represented for me a period of intense professional maturation and of confrontation with the epistemological limits of a discipline gradually assumed: software engineering. After the 1960s and 1970s, when Romanian computer science was still marked by pioneering work, the beginning of the following decade brought tensions between the centralized information system, with its planning and management ambitions, and the need for freedom of computation inspired by the emergence of mini- and especially micro-computers. The fragmentation of hardware also implied the fragmentation of software, a tendency contrary to market requirements, which soon led to the emergence of networks and distributed computing, a new paradigm that computer science was called upon to integrate. It was a time when Romanian computer science, under the pressure of state technological policy, was seeking its own scientific voice. Amid material and ideological constraints, research nevertheless managed to assert itself through originality and personal effort.
A synthetic description of this section is also available as a PDF: Order in Chaos. Software Engineering and Architectures on Sand (1980–1989).
In the 1980s I tried to bring into software design a discipline comparable to engineering discipline based on mathematical formalisms, without ignoring the inevitably human nature of creation: intuition, iteration, alternatives. From this tension crystallized the ideas of the abstract machine and the interform, and later the INTERFORM project.
In those years, in the courses I taught and in my Software Engineering laboratory at the Department of Computers of the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, the idea was born of an order in software production — an order sought within the methodological chaos of the time, when programming was still an art. This section documents precisely that search for balance between theoretical reflection, the need for technical rigor, and the artisanal creativity of professionals.
For my research, this decade had the role of measuring time through ideas: it marked the moment when my theoretical training began to become biographical experience, when the laboratory became a space of intellectual resistance. I consider it an essential testimony about the way in which the passion for order and form managed to survive in a context that, by its nature, privileged improvisation. In this sense, it is a confession about the search for meaning in chaos — a meaning that, retrospectively, proved to be the beginning of a new personal paradigm regarding software engineering.
An early text in which design is seen as a succession of controlled refinements over intermediate descriptions, trying to establish what can be formalized in an activity that remains, inevitably, creative.
The first explicit formulation of the abstract machine as a model of software design and of the “intermediate form” as a description of the project state on the path from specification to implementation.
The move from model to the proposal of a system: a CAD/CAM workshop for software development, built around a formal model of the design method and extensible through knowledge-engineering techniques.
INTERFORM is the practical materialization of the decade’s vision: an integrated assisted-development environment, built around the interform and a layered architecture, with advanced design and analysis functions.
A technical-methodological reflection on design as a systematic activity: what can be put into rules, what can be supported by tools, and where the designer’s judgment remains necessary.
A syntax-oriented approach to data/text processing and transformation, in which structure (grammar) becomes the central mechanism of controlled processing and generation.
Beyond the articles, INTERFORM was a laboratory and team project: implementation, contracts, iterations, and concrete tools. The project page is separated from the conceptual page on the interform and from the documentary sheets of articles or contracts.
Note: each of the above sheets has only an orientation role.
