On Reuse

Jeffrey Odell jeffo at esprithealth.com
Thu Jul 1 22:47:25 UTC 1999


Unfortunately, Amazon lists this book as out of print.

jlo

-----Original Message-----
From: Les Tyrrell [mailto:tyrrell at canis.uiuc.edu]
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 1999 2:20 PM
To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: On Reuse



This is a pretty huge topic...  luckily, there is a fairly extensive
body of literature on it, that is, literature that actually knows what
it's talking about.  There is also a fairly extensive body of literature
that parrots some sort of shadow of knowledge about the topic.  Which
is not to say that the statements you see are untrue, it's just that
you don't come away from them understanding what the problem was.

If you'd like a really good introduction to this topic, then I'd
strongly reccomend Edward Berard's book, which I believe is titled
"Design of Object-Oriented Software".  It is one of the extremely
few software books with EXTENSIVE references, usually three or more
for each item of discussion.  This makes a great starting point for
your own understanding of the subject.   Not for the faint-hearted,
but if you really want to dig in on the subject I think this is
one of the best places to start.  Beware authors who state but
do not support their own claims with extensive references- when I
see those, I think they're just making it all up.  For example,
there is this "7 +/- 2" rule about complexity that you often see
in various contexts.  But noone ever mentions what basis exists
for it, so it's considered to be a rule of thumb.  But there really
was research done on this, and there really is an original source in
the scientific literature for this "rule of thumb".

To me, the astonishing thing has been how old much of this literature
is- you would assume that it is some sort of brand new topic, but
you find the basis for this stuff originating not in the 80's, or the
70's, or even the 60's, but back in the 50's and even back in the 30's.
By the mid-80's, it appears that reuse had become a fairly mature
subject, and sufficiently well understood to be effectively carried out
in environments using procedural languages.  From what I've seen,
I'd have to say that reuse ceased to be a topic of research by that
time- from then on, it's been an issue of successfully applying that
knowledge.  Unfortunately, this is still a big issue as the problems
in applying reuse are primarily cultural rather than technical in nature.

les





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