Ned Batchelder had a pointer to this article by Richard Gabriel entitled ‘Objects have Failed’. As usual Richard has some excellent points, but there are a couple of things that irk me about the piece.

About the failure of reuse: it hasn’t. Failed that is. In fact, reuse has been very successful. A single example makes this abundantly clear: the Java class libraries. I think that this idea that reuse has failed comes from some of the over hyped rhetoric that was bandied around in the early days of OO, but this is like saying that the Internet has failed because it didn’t fulfil the dreams that people talked about at the height of the dot com boom.

The Feyerabend Project gets a mention again. Some valid points, but I don’t really have time for a project that so far just seems to be a list of ‘things we do not like’. When (if?) it finally produces some concrete proposals on how to imporove things then I’ll take notice.