🚀 go-pugleaf

Ben A. Mesander (ben@goldman.gnu.ai.mit.edu) wrote:
: In article <4air6a$9ik@gateway.ctg.com> ctg83158@gateway.ctg.com (Nicole Tedesco) writes:
:    I LOVE IT!!!  These posts have been great!  However, I must take
:    a minor exception: memory usage increase has not been simply a
:    silly excursion into time-wasting on the part of programmers and
:    memory chip-makers.  There is something real being built "under the
:    hood".  The potential of this "something" has not yet been fully
:    realized.  This "something" is called Software Abstraction.  It
:    is an effort to increase the overall profficiency of development
:    teams, and SIMULTANEOUSLY increase the QUALITY of the product.
:    You know, object-oriented programming and all that.

: Oh, like X windows. A giant overengineered object oriented piece of
: crap. Taken to its logical extreme in something called "CDE" that
: requires several megabytes just to present me with a button I can use
: to start a program with. And because it leaks memory all over the place,
: I have to log out every few days to reclaim swap space.

And of course, object oriented programming doesn't always improve
quality.  What it does is allow programmers to reuse code whether
it is bloated and buggy or elegant and efficient.  Languages like
C++ can be abused just like older programming languages.

:    I remember programming on the Timex Sinclair.  Sure, I could build
:    a quicky-program.  However, I didn't have room to include quality
:    checks, support for efficient evolution of the product, support
:    for very large data sets, and so on.  I was working on software
:    to aid an optometrist in his work.  We abandoned the project.  Why?
:    Quality problems and the lack of the ability to program a COMPLETE
:    set of business, medical and technical rules.  It didn't take us
:    long, in 1980-ish, to find the limits of our efforts.

: With object-oriented software technology, people are now able to program
: well beyond the limits of their efforts!

Back in the late seventies I knew an opthamologist who was using a series
of programs, written on an Apple II in BASIC, to grind out parameters for
laser surgery.  It worked very well for him.  The programs were designed
from the top down rather than just gluing bits of "reuseable" code
together.
--
Rick Kelly  rmk@tencats.rmkhome.com  rmk@rmkhome.com 
            http://tencats.rmkhome.com