Someone well-known in the IT field wrote about software reuse in the large vs. in the small about 10-15 years ago. The gist was that reuse in the small is a suc

Someone well-known in the IT field wrote about software reuse in the large vs. in the small about 10-15 years ago. The gist was that reuse in the small is a success, i.e. it's fairly simple to write a function that developers reuse within an application. When you try to generalize use beyond a certain context it becomes significantly more complicated to be successful. I think the motivation for the post was issues in object reuse in OO development. I'm trying to find the original post. John D. Cook's post shines the light once again on the difficulty of writing reusable components.