I think the analogy is not very accurate for two reasons:

  1. With programs, we're only interested in the "design" part of the process. What takes us less time to design a new program, is time won. We're not interested in the building of the car (compiling the program), whereas in the car business, this is one of the most important components.
  2. In most cases, we're only interested in whether the car will bring us from A to B (run as expected). We're generally not (as much) interested in how fast it does it, let alone how the car looks. For all we want, it could be a crate with four wheels, if it runs, it runs.

So I think re-use needs to be thought of with every component you build in mind. It needs to become a second nature. And your programming language must allow you to do that: Perl 4 didn't have true local variables, so building components was a pain then, to say the least. In general I have found, that my investment in the extra time to make components, rather than finished products, has always paid off for me.

I agree with you with regards to testing: you need a test-suite to be able to proof that new features work as expected. More importantly, you need to be able to verify that old features still work as before.

Finally, in software it is a lot easier to get different components to fit. Whether this looks nice or not, is basically immaterial. You just need the right glue. And Perl is just that!

Liz

In reply to Re: Re-use: moderation please. by liz
in thread Re-use: moderation please. by BrowserUk

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