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> Things I probably am going to reuse in other projects. [emphasis added] Fred Brooks said that a "programming product" takes about 3 times as much work as a p

by 8ren 16y ago

> Things I probably am going to reuse in other projects. [emphasis added] Fred Brooks said that a "programming product" takes about 3 times as much work as a plain program (so it becomes a module reusable by anybody). The extra work is in things like generalizing, testing and documenting. He claimed that a "programming systems component" takes about three times as much work again (that is, a module reusable somewhere else), with the work going into things like precisely defining interfaces, and integration testing. p.6-7, MM-M. He said all that long before object oriented was coined (even before ADTs), so he wasn't talking about objects, but about code reuse in general. What's the evidence? We see notoriously few FP libraries, but 10,000's of Java libraries (as an OO eg). The latter is a major reason touted by JVM languages for targeting it. While FP individuals do seem to reuse their own code quite a bit, the code reuse of systems programming products remains mostly theoretical for FP - but standard practice for OO. I think a more relevant distinction is between component consumers and component producers. The former learns libraries; and latter creates them. The former is closer to the customer and their application domain (where value becomes tangible); latter is closer to the raw materials, the essence of programming and nature's wild bounty (where value originates).

jackfoxy 16y ago
I'm still very much a novice at FP, but seeing as far as I can through my keyhole view I think FP offers a different, and in some ways deeper, level of absraction than OO, providing more re-use to the individual who becomes proficient, but less publishable reusable code. Here's what I mean by that. The author, in talking about the reusable functions he writes for the kind of tasks he performs is really creating a domain specific language (or fragments of a language) addressing his programming domain, whatever that is. The extra work that would be involved to make this reusable for other people is daunting, primarily because he can be fast and lose in defining his domain for his own personal use (in fact he may not even reflect on the fact he is defining a domain), but for his domain specific language to be useful to others he would have to be far more rigorous in domain definition, with all the attendant documentation, use case testing, etc. This level of effort is way beyond the level of effort require to define an OO framework, for instance. Therefore he produces something that provides him a deeper level of abstraction, but is not useful enough to others.

by 8ren 16y ago

jackfoxy 16y ago

I'm still very much a novice at FP, but seeing as far as I can through my keyhole view I think FP offers a different, and in some ways deeper, level of absraction than OO, providing more re-use to the individual who becomes proficient, but less publishable reusable code. Here's what I mean by that. The author, in talking about the reusable functions he writes for the kind of tasks he performs is really creating a domain specific language (or fragments of a language) addressing his programming domain, whatever that is. The extra work that would be involved to make this reusable for other people is daunting, primarily because he can be fast and lose in defining his domain for his own personal use (in fact he may not even reflect on the fact he is defining a domain), but for his domain specific language to be useful to others he would have to be far more rigorous in domain definition, with all the attendant documentation, use case testing, etc. This level of effort is way beyond the level of effort require to define an OO framework, for instance. Therefore he produces something that provides him a deeper level of abstraction, but is not useful enough to others.