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From: msellers@mentor.com (Mike Sellers)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Art vs. Engineering & Method vs. Genius
Message-ID: <1989Oct20.000957.22505@mentor.com>
Date: 20 Oct 89 00:09:57 GMT
Organization: engr
Lines: 52

Ralph Johnson wrote:
> From jnino@cs.utexas.edu 
>> My impression by reading the literature, is that there is no programming
>> methodology that has been recognized to be successful, and furthermore
>> that there is still need to develop a design methodology adequate for
>> OOP applications.
> 
> This is an incorrect impression.  People have been building large
> object-oriented systems successfully.  This indicates that they must
> have some sort of methodology, since large systems cannot be built
> successfully without one.  The problem is to determine their methodology.

I disagree.  A methodology is by nature a *known* set of rules and principles 
that people follow in a particular discipline.  What we have currently is
a situation where people are creating large object-oriented systems, but
rarely are there any explicit rules or procedures followed that apply to
the object-orientedness of the system.  It may be that a majority of the
OO systems out there were created using similar processes, but even if 
this is true (and I don't necessarily believe it is), it doesn't mean that
the processes and methods used are at the point where they are teachable or 
learnable by someone before they have been through one or more OOP projects.  

In effect, I believe we are at the point where we are doing Art (or at least
schtick), not science or engineering.  Once some of the methods that are
currently being used by the brighter ones among us have been filtered out
of the background noise and codified for use by the rest of us, we will have
the building blocks for some methodologies for object-oriented design.  

> It is true that OOD is quite a bit different from traditional design.
> It is also true that it is not written down much.  The people who know
> it do it instead of writing about it.  However, since people are successfully
> designing object-oriented systems, there must be some "method to their
> madness".  The problem is in learning it.
> 
> Ralph Johnson -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

I don't doubt that there are some incredibly useful methods being used
by OO programmers and designers in both university and industrial settings.
For myself, I have some inklings as to why I do what I do in the course of
a project (we're working in C++).  However, I have not as yet had the 
time-energy cross-product necessary to be able to reflect and apply the
reflections to come up with a useful set of methods.  I'm sure someone 
will soon, and then we'll be off and arguing about why it is that they 
are wrong, even if we ourselves can't quite articulate how we do it
differently.


-- 
Mike Sellers                ...!tektronix!sequent!mntgfx!msellers
Mentor Graphics Corp.                  msellers@mntgfx.MENTOR.COM
Electronic Packaging and Analysis Division -- AutoSurface Project
            "Amor est magis cognitivus quam cognitio"