Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!skiff.cis.ohio-state.edu!grichard From: grichard@skiff.cis.ohio-state.edu (Golden Richard) Newsgroups: comp.sw.components Subject: Re: Reasons for low reuse Message-ID: <60116@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 9 Sep 89 23:17:17 GMT Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: Golden Richard Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Lines: 24 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."