Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!bellcore!rutgers!ucsd!ames!ncar!boulder!scotth
From: scotth@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Scott Henninger)
Newsgroups: comp.sw.components
Subject: Reasons for low ADT reuse
Message-ID: <11928@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Date: 21 Sep 89 20:09:33 GMT
Sender: news@boulder.Colorado.EDU
Reply-To: scotth@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Scott Henninger)
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Lines: 29

|>From: billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe, 2847 )
|
|    All of the negatives you cite (except "may use more storage", which 
|    is bogus) are overcome by the reuse paradigm.  The ADT is developed
|    with extremely high quality at a high cost, but this cost is then 
|    spread over an extremely large number of users until the end of time;
|    the result is very much an economic win-win situation.

OK, so let's say this is true - that the high cost of creating "quality" ADTs
is distributed over the number of people that reuse it.  You gain a "cost"
advantage under the following conditions:

  1) The cost of reusing the component is small.
  2) It fits the needs of a large number of programmers AND they choose to use it. 

The extent to which these conditions are not realistic is the extent to which
this method will ultimately fail.

The ADT approach has been around for a long time, so I ask you, why is it not
currently practiced?  Don't tell me that training is the answer - programmers are
already trained to design and implement ADTs.

By the way, I'm still not convinced that ADTs will ever constitute anything more
than a trivial percentage of real application code, given either today's or tommorow's
technology.


-- Scott
   scotth@boulder.colorado.edu