Butler Lampson
Microsoft
2004
For many years programmers have dreamed of building systems from a library of reusable software components together with a little new code. The closest we've come is Unix commands connected by pipes. I'll discuss the fundamental reasons why software components of this kind haven't worked in the past and are unlikely to work in the future. Then I'll explain how the dream has come true in spite of this failure, and why most people haven't noticed.
Powerpoint, Acrobat, HTML. A paper is here.