I am delighted that our favorite Journal of Software: Practice and Experience (SPE) turns 50 and the year 2021 is its Golden Jubilee year! The founding fathers of SPE Journal, Charles Lang and David Barron, in their editorial for the first issue published in January 1971, noted “the continuing development of the application of computers in all walks of life is held back by the difficulty of producing software”. They also wrote “As applications become more sophisticated and systems get larger, the effects of bad software will be less easy to ignore since the possibility of disastrous errors will increase.”

During the last 50 years there are many instances of software errors causing failures of big missions, critical business, and medical services. A Wikipedia list of software bugs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs) shows their serious consequences—either financially or as a threat to human well‐being from many application domains including medical, space, telecom, finance, military, transportation, and government administration. Just to share a recent example: A day‐long outage in trading at the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) on Monday November 16, 2020 was traced to “software bug” in their new equity trading platform.

Lang and Barron identified seven major factors that have led to this situation, which continue to hold true even after 50 years. I would like to state the last two verbatim:

Since its foundation, SPE primarily aimed at addressing these two problems by serving as a vehicle for dissemination of practice and experience of software researchers, developers, engineers, and practitioners to write up and present their work in a form that will be useful to others. Although software practice has greatly improved from then with the help of these continued efforts from SPE and community at large, many challenges yet to be addressed.

This unique aim of SPE has drawn me to it and publish my work 25 years ago when I was working on a Microkernel based Operating System for India's PARAM Supercomputers at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C‐DAC). When I was invited to join SPE team of Editors in 2014, I was delighted and continue to consider it as my privilege to be part of this visionary and pioneering journal, whose founding year happens to be the same year in which I was born!

我很高兴我们最喜欢的《软件杂志：实践与经验》（SPE）诞生50周年，而2021年将是其金禧年！SPE Journal的创始者Charles Lang和David Barron在1971年1月出版的第一期社论中指出：“由于难以生产软件，阻碍了各行各业计算机应用的不断发展” 。他们还写道：“随着应用程序变得越来越复杂，系统变得越来越大，由于灾难性错误的可能性将会增加，因此不良软件的影响将变得不那么容易被忽视。”

在过去的50年中，有许多软件错误实例导致大型任务，关键业务和医疗服务失败。Wikipedia的软件错误列表（https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs）显示了这些错误的严重后果-无论是经济上的还是对许多应用领域（包括医疗，太空，电信，金融，军事，运输和政府管理。仅举一个最近的例子：2020年11月16日星期一在澳大利亚证券交易所（ASX）进行的一天交易中断被追溯到其新的股票交易平台中的“软件漏洞”。

Lang和Barron确定了导致这种情况的七个主要因素，即使在50年后，这些因素仍然成立。我想说最后两个字：

自成立以来，SPE的主要目的是通过传播软件研究人员，开发人员，工程师和从业人员的实践和经验的工具来解决这两个问题，以对他人有用的形式撰写和介绍他们的工作。尽管从那时起，在SPE和整个社区的不断努力下，软件实践已大大改善，但仍有许多挑战尚待解决。

SPE的这一独特目标吸引了我，并在25年前发布了我的著作，当时我在高级计算开发中心（C-DAC）上为印度PARAM超级计算机开发基于微内核的操作系统。当我于2014年受邀加入SPE编辑团队时，我感到非常高兴，并继续将其视为这本具有远见和开拓性期刊的一份荣幸，该杂志的创立年份恰好与我出生的那一年相同！