Software Reuse

[dday@mimsy.UUCP (Dennis Doubleday)]

In article <4658@utah-cs.UUCP> shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs) writes:
>An interesting analogy.  It says a lot about prevailing software culture:
>
>1. Available chips do not always meet requirements exactly.  For instance,
>a board might need 3 NAND gates, but the 7400 has 4.  EEs just ignore the
>extra gate, or tie its pins to something stable.  In a similar situation,
>software people fume and gnash their teeth over "wasted space".
>
I've seen this standardized circuits analogy to software packages a number
of times, and I don't really buy it.  Software people are attempting to
deal with a much larger and less well-defined problem domain than
hardware people.  Otherwise, we wouldn't even need software.  We could
just design hardware to handle every application.

>2. Running wires around boards loses some performance, relative to cramming
>everything onto a single chip.  All the techniques for modules, objects, etc,
>tend to slow things down.  Again, software types tear their hair out and
>vow to recode everything into one assembly language procedure.  

Performance is an important issue in many time-critical applications.  I
don't know anybody who wants to code everything in assembler.  I do know
people who are WILLING to code in assembler if it's the only way timing
constraints can be met.

>In short, I believe there are no technical problems or issues with reuse;
>it's the software culture that has to change.  At present, the prevailing
>attitude is that the densely-coded, highly-optimized, do-everything program
>is a sort of ideal to which everyone aspires.

I don't think you're up to date on what's happening, at least in the Ada
community.  I just completed a 13.5K source line Ada program, of which
7.5K source lines were contributed by reusable utility packages that
I got from the Ada repository (abstract string, stack, list, counted 
ordered set, and binary tree data types as well as packages for 
command line interface, lexical analysis of Ada, and parsing).




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