From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_DATE autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,b19fa62fdce575f9 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1994-11-21 06:53:55 PST Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Path: nntp.gmd.de!urmel.informatik.rwth-aachen.de!newsserver.rrzn.uni-hannover.de!aix11.hrz.uni-oldenburg.de!nordwest.germany.eu.net!pophh!Germany.EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!ois!beckwb From: beckwb@ois.com (R. William Beckwith) Subject: Re: Why don't large companies use Ada? Message-ID: Organization: Objective Interface Systems, Inc. X-Newsreader: TIN version 1.2 PL2 References: <3a6oc5$dkh@nntp1.u.washington.edu> <3aj9a3$4am@s-cwis.unomaha.edu> Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 14:53:55 GMT Date: 1994-11-21T14:53:55+00:00 List-Id: Jean D. Ichbiah (ichbiah@jdi.tiac.net) wrote: : Can you seriously talk of rewriting frameworks of classes as encompassing : as Borland's OWL, Microsoft Foundation classes, or Zinc? Does not make much : sense to me and goes against the most important lesson we have learnt in : the past twenty years: Reuse, Reuse, Reuse, ... Reuse is for projects not for products. Projects typically have low reuse. COTS software companies have very high reuse if you count their customers. If you are writing software that will be used in only a few projects then reuse is critical. However, COTS software gets used in hundreds or thousands of projects. Development cost is insignificant to the potential benefit to the customer base. Thus, most software companies partially or completely rewrite their products every three to five years. Look at the most visible examples: * Oracle did it with version 7. * Sybase did it with System 10. * Rational did it with Apex. * Borland did it with version 2.0 of OWL. * Microsoft did it with MFC before they even released the first version! (see OOPSLA proceedings a couple of years ago for MFC design team article) * We at OIS are on our second re-write of Screen Machine. Certain bodies of code are so frequently reused by others that it is imperative to make fundamental, architectural improvements to the code to increase flexibility, reliability, and performance. The products you mention, OWL, MFC, and Zinc, are fairly thin object oriented covers above a non-object oriented API. They are much better interfaces that the underlying API's. However, they are not even close to the depth and power of a fully implemented class framework. The real frameworks of the future don't use the underlying toolkits (Taligent, OpenStep, Fresco). They provide a much broader, more flexible architecture that is implemented in that O-O language. Again, I must mention the Smalltalk communities `lack of reuse'. They don't reuse Motif or (most of) MS-Windows. (I see everything through GUI glasses ;-) : Not only the overwhelming difficulty of rewriting the code. But you will : have to test it, certify it, and ... maintain it. And if you have not been : discouraged by this mountain of effort, you will have to produce user : documentation of comparable quality - in paper an on-line - to that : existing for these frameworks. So I guess you believe that David Weller should be writing bindings to the C++ Booch components instead of re-writing them? Uggh. Makes me shudder at the thought. We have a better language than the developers of the C++ frameworks did. We will end up with better frameworks by using the languages power, not by binding to other frameworks. : See you in a few hundred man-years. I'd like our customers to think that it takes us `a few hundred man-years' to write our products. But in practice, the development, testing, and maintenance of bindings closely rivals the re-implementation of a framework using more native approaches. And the bindings can't even compare to the functionality of the pure approach. : Jean D. Ichbiah ... Bill Beckwith