I’ve been out of the programming Biz for awhile now. And hopefully things have really changed for the better. I just don’t know that it has from personal experience.
And now with that being said, I found that the concept of re-usable code was a great concept. But in practice led to Bloatware. That is software that had so many Re-used modules that had unused portions in them that were unnecessary for the project at hand.
And quite frankly in the software projects that I worked on it turned out that the most efficient use of code and equipment usually came down to a single individual writing and then handing it over for testing to another individual or small group that was known for breaking code and finding bugs or faults.
The end result was code that is still in use 20+ years after being written.
And once again I am no longer in the programming Biz. So if things have improved to the point that re-usable upper level code is feasible. Then go for it.
Also as a side note. My brain got worn out while trying to remember nuances and syntax in the various programming Languages, I learned, Assembler, BASIC, RPG, COBOL, Fortran IV and 77, C, C++ They sometimes became a jumble in those late morning coding sessions. And after all that I found that it was too much and just concentrated on one.
Today I just do some farming and I am happier than I have been in Decades. There is something to be said for downsizing to a simpler lifestyle.
I’m an old guy too - pretty much been all those places and done all that just like you. I remember when the new fangled C++ compilers came out - I was much more excited about the graphics support in the package than the ++.
So, in fact, I wrote the article more for guys like you and me than anyone else. Things have changed; but in case you’re wondering - there still are bad programmers in the world. (LOL!) The more that gets perfected for reuse, the better.
Back in the 1980s, I worked on “toolkits” for creating certain types of applications. They weren’t perfected until they had been seasoned with the experience of at least three applications. You could have things like reading and parsing the same kind of file (why do that more than once?) and generating the same kind of file, and match them up in different ways to translate various file types in and out of the file type the toolkit was designed for. You could also provide utilities to help.
Yes, a lot has happened since then. I tried to make the article both easy to ready by not belaboring details, but hopefully enough to get the point across. The battle for reusable code is moving target (as the article points out), but what we’re looking at here is the fact that looking back on so many years of experience - there’s some meta-knowledge with the knowledge. And that just might come to something.
Ding Ding Ding!
And we have a winner!
You, sir, are correct.
A lot of people now (particularly young, foreign developers) just try to glue together a variety of crap they find for free on the Web. And the end result is quite a spectacle indeed! :)