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From: reggie@pdnbah.UUCP (George Leach)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,comp.lang.smalltalk,comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: software ICs (was Re: C++ vs Objective-C)
Message-ID: <1628@pdn.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 22-Oct-87 09:21:44 EST
Article-I.D.: pdn.1628
Posted: Thu Oct 22 09:21:44 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Oct-87 12:01:57 EST
References: <3405@ece-csc.UUCP> <638@its63b.ed.ac.uk> <1811@watcgl.waterloo.edu> <1549@pdn.UUCP> <1661@ppi.UUCP> <3179@ames.arpa>
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Reply-To: reggie@pdnbah.UUCP (George Leach)
Organization: Paradyne Corporation, Largo, Florida
Lines: 53
Summary: No Silver Bullet
Xref: mnetor comp.lang.misc:771 comp.lang.smalltalk:373 comp.lang.c++:533

In article <3179@ames.arpa> fouts@orville.nas.nasa.gov.UUCP (Marty Fouts) writes:
>In article <1661@ppi.UUCP> cox@ppi.UUCP (Brad Cox) writes:
 
>>. . . But the improvement has always turned out to
>>be arithmetic in impact.  The geometric improvements needed to bring our
>>productivity in line with that of hardware engineers ........

      [stuff deleted]
 
>I have three problems with this comment.........
 
      [stuff deleted]
 
>The third problem I have is with the loose claims of 'geometric' as
>apposed to 'linear' improvements in productivity.  I've been reading
>about programmer productivity for a long time, .......
 
      [stuff deleted]

>All in all, many things are important in the improvements that have
>been achieved and none of them alone are going to give the ultimate
>performance improvement.  Careful implementation of languages for
>maximum expressiveness has improved productivity, as has understanding
>the way programs should be laid out to aid understanding; but so have
>faster machines, interactive operating systems, and decent debuggers.
>It all needs to be worked on, and none of it is going to give us magic
>productivity enhancements.


       At the recent OOPSLA'87 Conference in Orlando, Peter Wegner stood
up and addressed the members of one of the Panel Discussions (I forget 
which one) and voiced some of the same concerns about Object-Oriented
Programming in general.  The banquet speaker, Michael Jackson, had a
similar point of view. It seems that we are always looking for that
*magic* and want to believe that we are capable of discovering something
to better our lives.  Is OOP the answer?  Being a bit sceptic I would
tend to say NO, but I'll wait until I have some experience under my belt
first.  


        Fredrick Brooks presented an Invited Paper last year at one of the
IFIP Conferences last year on this very topic:  No Silver Bullet - Essence
and Accidents of Software Engineering.  It is a highly recommended paper 
which seems to take a down to earth view of this topic.  It was originally
published in Information Processing 86, H.J. Kugler (Ed.), Elsevier Science
Publishers B.V. (North-Holland).  However, I beleive that it was published
in IEEE Computer withing the past 4 or 5 months.


George W. Leach					Paradyne Corporation
{gatech,codas,ucf-cs}!usfvax2!pdn!reggie	Mail stop LF-207
Phone: (813) 530-2376				P.O. Box 2826
						Largo, FL  34649-2826