Brad J. Cox

Planning the software industrial revolution

The author traces the US history of invention and technology transfer from the 1700s to the present and asks whether software development can stop being a process-centered cottage industry by the application of interchangeable parts technology. He maintains that a revolution is needed to accomplish this and outlines the steps of such a revolution. The author clarifies the meaning of object oriented, discusses the value rigidity trap, and provides a commercial example of the approach that he advocates.<<ETX>>

Message/Object Programming: An Evolutionary Change in Programming Technology

Could a marriage of the message/object model, a la Smalltalk-80, and the operator/operand model, a la Unix, improve the lot of both users and programmers? Stay tuned...

Is multiple inheritance essential to OOP? (panel)

Multiple inheritance has been adopted by many 00 programming languages (such as C++, CLOS, and Eiffel). On the other hand, there are languages (such as Smalltalk, Objective C, and Object Pascal) that do not offer multiple inheritance. Despite missing the feature, these languages seem to be as effective as those that offer it. It is then natural to ask how essential multiple inheritance is to object-oriented programming.

Producer: A tool for translating Smalltalk-80 to Objective-C

Source to source translation tools provide a way of integrating the strengths of production programming environments like C/UNIX™ with rapid prototyping environments like Smalltalk-80™ into a comprehensive hybrid environment that spans more of the software development life-spiral than ever before. This paper describes a tool-assisted process for translating Smalltalk-80 programs into Objective-C™, and shows how the tool, called Producer, is used in practice. To assist others in using this translation tool, we have made Producer publicly available without charge on USENET.

Superdistribution and the economics of bits

Why is the engineering and distribution of software fundamentally different from the engineering and distribution of other engineered objects? The author presents a unique answer to this question-an answer that could lead to a fundamental change in the way that software professionals view their creations and software marketers sell them. The infrastructure he proposes would make it feasible to buy and sell digital goods with any terms and conditions imaginable: pay-per-year, pay-per-minute, pay-per-save, pay-per-keystroke, and so on. Even todays pay-to-own terms and conditions would remain feasible, with ownership technologically enforced via invocation metering, but precisely which prices, terms and conditions should vendors offer, and which set of conditions would be most desirable to the buyers they hope to attract? Such questions are complicated, but answerable. Each is merely the electronic counterpart to questions we routinely confront in the tangible world of everyday experience, but cyberspace emerged less than a generation ago, which is not nearly enough time to even define-let alone build and deploy-a robust basis for the ownership of digital property. These technical issues are only the easy part compared to the social issues of building a true information-age economy.

From reuse repositories to global area networks: Dempsy dumpsters of the information age

The software crisis is a quarter-century old; as old as software engineering itself. Isn’ t it time to recognize that this crisis is a symptom of a deeper problem than software engineering’s traditional infatuation with programming languages and methodologies could ever get at? Isn’t it time to stop and reflect on why software engineering is still delivering at best arithmetic improvement, while our colleagues intangible engineering domains make exponentially growing improvements seem almost routine?

Developing software for large-scale reuse (panel)

Software reuse is a simple idea: reduce the cost of software development by developing less new software. In practice, however, achieving software reuse on a large scale has been frustratingly difficult. Nevertheless, as the complexity and cost of software systems continues to rise, there has been growing interest in really trying to make large-scale reuse a reality. Interest in reuse has been particularly. strong in both the Ada and objectoriented programming communities. This panel brings together key experts from these communities to discuss the issues, problems and potentials of reuse. This discussion is continued from the first meeting of this panel at the Tenth Washington Ada Symposium last June.