Re: Defending Greg

[cis.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!newsserver.]

alex@cs.umd.edu (Alex Blakemore) writes:

| In article <204jfg$lar@europa.eng.gtefsd.com> eric@capella.tsc.gtefsd.com
|  (Eric Peterson) writes:

>> I think Ada deserves what it got, because in many cases the same people who
>> promoted top-down design also promoted Ada as a vehicle for it

| I remember many (if not most) Ada proponents being horrified by
| top down design and 2167 - and certainly most Ada evangalists were promoting
| several methods - with OO design and incremental development near the
| top favorite and top down and waterfall methods getting much disdain. 
| This was around 1985.

Nothing but confirmation from me on this point. In late 1984/early 1985,
the group I was with was learning and evaluating Ada for use in real-time
flight simulation. Simultaneously, we were receiving training in the
still relatively new area of structured analysis/structured design for
real-time applications. It was obvious then that the two paradigms were
not wholly compatible.

Grady's brown book was hot off the press, and I remember quite well
trying to scale up his leaf-counting example to simulators. So right
from the start, the Ada community embraced object-orientation as a
viable design strategy.

The logic is straightforward. Look at each design methodology and ask
"Where do packages fit in?". Not to speak for Grady Booch, but this is
essentially what he did. The answer lay in the burgeoning realm of
object-oriented programming languages, particularly Smalltalk. By the
way, I don't believe that "OOP" was yet a buzz-cronym.

I hate to say it, guys, but the diversity of languages and paradigms has
always been a Good Thing. Delete any members of the set {OO, SA/SD, Ada,
C, C++, LISP Flavors, FORTRAN, Smalltalk, ...} and none of the others in
the set remain the same. Frankly, I'm having trouble seeing the
difference in how you design for Ada vs. C++. I've done both, and the
same basic OO approach has suited me just fine.


-- 
Mike Berman
University of Maryland, Baltimore County     Fastrak Training, Inc.
berman@umbc.edu                              (301)924-0050
       The views represented in the above post are my own.