Re: next "big" language?? (disagree)

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Ian Ward said

"2. Trying to reuse software for different purpose than it was originally
defined."

Sure, but abstraction is all about making sure that software you use
is maximally reusable, i.e. that the set of purposes for which the
software you write is as large as possible. If you have no method
for easily enforcing and taking advantage of data abstraction, you
cannot easily avoid over-specification and thus narrowing down the
scope of possible reuse purposes.

Code modification is the worst possible form of reuse (only slight
ly better, and sometimes worse than, rewriting stuff from scratch).
The whole idea is to reuse code as much as possible WITHOUT ever
having to touch it. Sure, in the C world, the normal paradigm for
code reuse is precisely to grab source and much with it, and that
is not surprising given the language, but it is far from ideal,
and from one point ofview you can see a major design goal in modern
language design is to eliminate the need for (and therefore the
practice of) this kind of source code mucking.