Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cimshop!davidm From: cimshop!davidm@uunet.UU.NET (David S. Masterson) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: Re: CASE - The Emperor has no clothes on! Message-ID: Date: 15 Jun 90 17:23:27 GMT References: <37538@genrad.UUCP> <55137@microsoft.UUCP> <1990Jun13.070649.14929@caen.engin.umich.edu> <55235@microsoft.UUCP> Sender: davidm@cimshop.UUCP Distribution: comp Organization: Consilium Inc., Mountain View, California. Lines: 32 In-reply-to: jimad@microsoft.UUCP's message of 14 Jun 90 18:11:36 GMT In article <55235@microsoft.UUCP> jimad@microsoft.UUCP (Jim ADCOCK) writes: I disagree, in general. Toplessness need not be anarchy. It just requires good citizenship, and good team players. When people carefully craft classes to match a particular design hierarchy, then they end up with classes that are not reusable -- they automatically get "tuned" for their present place in the design hierarchy. Ultimately, then, top-down designed code becomes throw-away code -- the design is just too immutable. As we head towards more and more complicated software, concepts of "top", "bottom", "edge" code, etc, become meaningless -- because the vast majority of software developers are in the middle of the project somewhere. These developers have to do their design and coding based on the requirements and constraints of their neighboring programmers, people who are producers of classes this class needs, or consumers of this class. The important thing is to strive to encapsulate each design, so that each software developer only has a half dozen interrelated producer/consumers to interact with. When you don't have design encapsulation, but rather have dozens of people whose needs/constraints you must meet, then life becomes hell. Now I'm interested... Where do you start the process of encapsulation? Is this not a "top-down" approach -- namely breaking things up into "encapsulatable" pieces? Agreed, this process doesn't travel all the way down to the lowest level pieces, but I contend that it does travel from the top until it reaches a point where the pieces are "manageable". -- =================================================================== David Masterson Consilium, Inc. uunet!cimshop!davidm Mt. View, CA 94043 =================================================================== "If someone thinks they know what I said, then I didn't say it!"