President’s Letter Stuart I. Feldman
Fifty Years and Still Growing
This anniversary issue represents how Communications
has covered the depth and
breadth of the computing field
over the decades, as well as its
growth, and the industry’s shifts
in technological focus. The
name “Association for Computing Machinery” once explained
the primary interest of our
members. Of course, over the
last 50 years, both ACM and
CACM have embraced systems,
software, services, policy, the
role professionals play, and other
topics relating to information
technology.
Subjects such as algorithms,
architecture, operating systems,
programming languages, networking, databases, software
engineering, and artificial intelligence are at the heart of the “
classic” CACM and have driven
decades of progress. CACM published many great papers in these
areas that are still quoted today.
Nevertheless, those subjects do
not cover the bulk of activity in
computing. Far more effort goes
into design, integration, deployment, and support of applications than into the creation of
new algorithms and core components. Successful software developers will always need to
engineer core software, essential
tools, and critical applications.
But they must also apply their
skills and knowledge to problems
of societal, scientific, and commercial importance. In recent
years, CACM has reflected these
broader concerns.
The global IT industry will
continue to expand, with turns
toward services, integration, distributed computing, dynamic
information, and increasing
demands for reliability, security,
usability, and accessibility.
Research and advanced technol-
ogy are growing in these areas,
and are new generating true
excitement and new possibilities.
ACM is creating a new editorial
model for CACM (see Moshe
Vardi’s article, page 44). We have
taken great care to ensure this plan
reflects the needs of our readers,
particularly their strong interest in
areas at the forefront of the computing field—what is coming from
research labs and appearing in
advanced applications as well as
what is required to deliver
advanced systems. Our members
are also keen to learn how government and policy initiatives can
shape progress around the world.
This issue sums up the glorious
past of CACM. Its future should
be even better! c
STUART I. FELDMAN ( sif@acm.org) is
President of the ACM and Vice President–Engineering at Google.
