Re: Picking the Tools -- Marrying processing models to data models

[Christian Nentwich <c.nentwich@cs.ucl.ac.uk>]

> > OO does not make reuse magically happen. However, in the hands of a skilled
> > developer who knows how to design with reuse in mind, OO is a much more
> > effective tool for supporting reuse than alternative approaches.
> Such as?  I've mentioned some modeling facilities not native to OO.  You
> say that OO has better propensity to reuse?  What makes you think so?

Linda Northrop gave a nice (tough a bit marketing-oriented) keynote at
ICSE in Toronto last week on product line development. One of the core
statements was that
OO hasn't delivered as much as it promised in the reuse area, which is
not to say
that it hasn't delivered in other areas such as dealing with complexity
and raising design into the problem domain.

It just so happens though, that software engineers and programmers
prefer evolution to revolution, so OO won't go away anytime soon. XML is
not post-OO,
because OO isn't over for a long time. 

Advanced separation of concerns is a much better bet for replacing OO
(see IBM's hyperj and aspect-oriented programming), and has great
potential for improving reuse. How XML fits in there remains to be seen.

Christian