[thelist] Enterprise Red Tape was: Web Based Employee Directory- prt 2

[Ken Schaefer]

On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:39:41 -0500, Luther, Ron <ron.luther at hp.com> wrote:

> (I'm not saying it's 'a bad thing" ... maybe code re-use works better in a
> very specialized industry, like oil, where you might have a very complex
> equation that you could code once and call from multiple sources ... I just
> think the benefits of code re-use have been severely oversold.)

<sarcasm level="extreme">
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more . I was thinking about how a
modern OS works.

For example, most OSes have a central set of components for managing
printing. Each user application uses a central interface to print, and
each printer manufacturer supplies a printer driver.

It would be much better if each application vendor supplied their own
print manager! And each printer manufacturer had to supply a driver
that worked specifically with the print manager of the application!
You'd need a print driver for Word, another for Mozilla, and a 3rd for
Photoshop. Imagine trying to buy a printer!

And each individual print manager wouldn't have a set of standard
calls for printing things. If you had a word processor, and you wanted
to print on A4 paper, you'd have one bit of code, and if you wanted to
print on letter, you'd have another bit of code. And if you wanted to
resize letter -> A4 (or visa versa) you'd need two separate bits of
code again, because we really shouldn't reuse a generic algorithm for
doing resizing. If you wanted to print in colour, you'd have one bit
of code, and if you wanted to print in black/white, then you'd have
another bit of code (because we can't treat black/white as a subset of
"colour" printing).


And fonts! Each application should have its own font manager, and
supply its own font standard, and have its own method of rendering
those fonts onscreen! And algorithms for smoothing and scaling fonts
should not be shared between fonts! Instead, we should embed the
algorithms into each individual font!

And GUI elements! User applications shouldn't call central OS APIs to
render screen elements like scrollbars, maximise/minimise buttons and
chrome! Each user application should supply it's own chrome, and its
own window manager!

I can't believe we ever left those days - how much better computing was...
</sarcasm>

Cheers
Ken