Google
 
Web asimjalis.blogspot.com

Friday, January 14, 2005

Thoughts on Code Reuse III

by Asim Jalis

The way object-oriented programs decouple and intertwine is an optimal way to structure systems from certain perspectives -- e.g. it optimizes use of system resources. But how does it fare with reuse. And I see much more reuse (of my own code) at the Unix command line application level than at the class level. My command line applications live forever, while my GUI applications are dead on arrival. There are different boundaries. There is the object boundary, there is the process boundary, and there is the machine boundary. Unix is more biased towards multiple decoupled programs in different processes, while the OO tendency is to put everything into a single process. The question is whether the Unix approach tilts the balance towards more reuse, and why. I am deeply unmotivated to write code unless I can use it more than once. I feel that I have been writing a lot of code that gets used only once. And this makes me wonder if I could get more reuse if I started breaking my applications down into smaller pieces that did precisely one thing well.