Re: “Discrete Software Tools” and Object-Oriented Programming
Dan Hill writes about an article on “Dennis Ritchie, Bell labs, C and Unix” in this weeks’ Economist:
Check the key points: portability; abstraction; the compact core, with the beginnings of object-oriented programming in those “discrete software tools”.
This reminded me about something I’ve thought about before, so I wrote the following comment:
The “discrete software tools” are perhaps better likened to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). The reason for this is that objects seldom are discrete. There is a principle in object-oriented programming that says that objects shouldn’t make any assumptions about their “users” (other objects), but generally that principle isn’t followed. More commonly, an object’s interface is shaped by whatever it is its users need. But with SOA, as with discrete tools chained using pipes, there’s no choice; you don’t have control over your users.