🚀 go-pugleaf

Another (perhaps secondary) reason that I see for the current "low reuse"
syndrome is the number of extremely sloppy components that are available.
While working on a project at the University of New Orleans, we decided
to "save time" and purchase a number of C components from a company in
New Jersey (whose name I should actually mention, but I won't).   To make
a long story short, some of the development ended up taking 10X longer than
if we had simply written everything ourselves.   Bugs started to creep in
and workarounds sometimes took days.  

I'm all for reusable software components, but some reasonably formal system
of specifying *exactly* what the components do and a verification method
for providing better than "a 50-50 chance" of the components meeting specs
are absolutely necessary.   A major problem with using someone
else's code in object form is that, barring a rigorous specification, it's 
virtually impossible to ascertain *exactly* what a component does.   Having
source is helpful, but who wants to poke through hundreds (thousands?) of
pages of code "verifying" functionality?



-=-
Golden Richard III        OSU Department of Computer and Information Science
grichard@cis.ohio-state.edu         "I'm absolutely positive!  ...or not."