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Phase II (Sep 93 - Mar 94): Design

' ... I would have put a lot more emphasis on what comes out and exactly how it can initially be of benefit to people rather than making it nice. I would also hack it considerably smaller. For a start with I wouldn't..that's not just because it's less work but because you've got something..a nucleus that's small and solid and very well built, it's very easy to build on it. As long as it's well structured internally, as long as the software is right internally, it's very easy to build on that and whereas we've got this big thing that's been stuck together and now it's very hard to change things within it. ...

It should have been, certainly with the prototyping approach that was taken, it should have been small and grown, ... That's the way things are built these days is very very modular, ... and it's lots of very tight code with specific interfaces. That allows it to grow very easily. You can say this bit sits here and essentially it has certain data on it and you build it's interface through to here ... And we can build bits on the side, we don't have to integrate it ... I mean this doesn't talk directly to the code, it doesn't need to know the structure, exactly how it's kept in here, it just needs to be able to get the information. So we build these fences as it were. And although on the outside it looks like you're making the code more difficult, it looks like you're making it more long winded, the code is more long winded, but these things are not the bottlenecks of speed these days not with the sort of machines we put on people's desks these days, they're not the bottlenecks and it allows you to do this.

People talk about object oriented until you're sick of it but it's still a concept. ... This has been around a long time. The buzz word is the only new thing really about object oriented techniques. ... When you don't do it then to build on it is extremely difficult. To make modifications is extremely difficult. If you want to make a mod to it, you want to add something here, an extra bit of data, and rearrange the way the data's kept, then this has change, this has to change, you're changing that so this has to change. Suddenly you've got to rewrite because of small little changes.' ...

X042 page 002.04 (tape 05.2.03) Matt Notes/Tape 14/06/94

Social influence:
Technical influence: Tasks: Software implementation


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