Software - Ted Codd's Legacy
I'm re-reading Codd's 3-page monograph on Data Models, originally published in 1980, and I'm struck once again by the sheer elegance of the man's ideas.

“Numerous authors appear to think of a data model as nothing more than a collection of data structure types. This is like trying to understand the way the human body functions by studying anatomy but omitting physiology. The operators and integrity rules are essential to any understanding of how the structures behave.”

What's sad is that so few people doing software development actually understand these concepts. If they did, we'd have database management systems that correctly implemented the relational model. And then we'd have simpler systems that could manage data more reliably and effectively, and could build simpler and more reliable applications on top of them.

I've been predictiing for the past few years that the relational model gets "rediscovered" about 10-15 years from now when all the current data management fads and fictions have finally been shown to be hollow and hopelessly flawed. I'm assuming Codd's reputation gets refurbished at about the same time.