[Setools] What we have yet

[Klaus D. Witzel]

Hey Hans,

on Mon, 26 Jun 2006 22:00:48 +0200, you wrote:
> Hi Klaus,
>
>>>>
>>>>>> I'm interested in better (not necessarily faster) prototyping, in  
>>>>>> the sense of drafting new or refining existing software at the  
>>>>>> draft level, with full support of a running+reflexive system (and  
>>>>>> of DNU, of course :)
>>>>>
Alex wrote:
>>>>> Do you have an idea of what is currently missing in Squeak ?
Hans asked:
>>> Can you say a little bit more ?
>>
>> Sure. You ask a specific question, I promise to do my best answering it.
>
> Hehe, would be glad if I have one. My question is: what you (and  
> Alexandre) talking about....What is the context for "reuse", "rewarding"  
> "prototyping" in the discussion above ?

Ok, your nagging and lots of google-ing helped to find something which can  
serve as the picture (which I can reuse ;-) Have a look at what they  
called Round-Trip Engineering, in the poster downloadable from

- http://prog.vub.ac.be/progsite/Person.php?rdid=25070

they describe a "... two-phased approach that continuously synchronizes  
between
a data modeling view and a view on an object-oriented implementation ..."  
as well as "... SelfSync is a tool that implements the two-phased approach  
...".

This comes close to what I wrote above, doesn't it. I hope this answers  
your question on the context of prototyping.

The context for reuse and reward is: whatever sw engineering tool we have  
seen in the past (my IT "past" is  > than 30 years), people didn't use it  
for reusing existing objects / components / etc. Instead, new tools appear  
as it they are video games !

In the previous millenium one of the main reasons for not to reuse was  
licensing, but nowadays with open source this no longer holds. But  
(almost) nobody is reusing existing software, everybody starts (almost)  
 from scratch. One reason for this is, I think, the inability to *find*  
something reusable. I therefore suggested to invent rewards for maximizing  
reuse. With rewards I do not only mean the obvious monetary reward, but  
every form of benefit for the engineer which does indeed reuse. Because  
the main thing in software engineering is the toolset, we should have  
tools which reward resuse (and not "only" tools for syntax checking, OO,  
models, test, etc). This was my point.

/Klaus