[tlug] Issuses posed by code reuse

[Nguyễn Vũ Hưng <vuhung16plus@example.com>]

Hello all,

# Forked from lingo@

On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 1:29 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
>
> An interesting reference to such nuances is in Fred Brooks's Mythical
> Man-Month, 20th Anniversary Edition, where he discusses how reusable
> component libraries can be considered a "language" of complexity that
> starts to compare to natural language.

Interesting. Thanks for point the metaphor out; I've just read a
summary of the book a few days ago.

> He then uses that analogy to
> argue that (1) people can master such libraries and use them to
> dramatically increase productivity,

In software engineering, newly written code (新規) and modifying code (改造) are
treated differently as they have different impacts on programmers who
are new and old
the the existing code and/or the libraries.

In your example, the situtation is a little different but they share a
thing in common:
Effort is required to learn existing libraries until they get their feet wet.

> but (2) they aren't a "silver
> bullet" that will give an order of magnitude increase in productivity
> all by themselves.

I think Fred Brook's arguments are true for large project like
developing 360/OS.

However, I think that in large project like developing an OS, to
reduce the numbers of commnication channels
needed among *modules* and people working on it, the Unix philosophy
has been a manifesto:
Building small tools that does exactly what it needs, promoting text
based format to eliminate
the effor of learning existing formats and interchange interface
between modules.

I love that book but unfortunately, I consider it a good extreme case
and does not have much
practical use in today's software engineering (at least for my work).


-- 
Best Regards,
Nguyen Hung Vu [aka: NVH] ( in Vietnamese: Nguyễn Vũ Hưng )
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