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From: jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)
Subject: Re: What is wrong with OO ?
In-Reply-To: Tansel Ersavas's message of Fri, 20 Dec 1996 16:15:57 -0800
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Date: Mon, 23 Dec 1996 18:51:20 GMT
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In article <32BB2C3D.68CB@rase.com> Tansel Ersavas <tansel@rase.com> writes:

> that system for our certain needs. Nobody is talking about representing
> the entire information in one diagram, or even representing entire
> systems with only diagrams. However, I will not debate the usefulness of
> diagrams.

Diagrams are cleary useful and sometimes basically essential.  The
same thing can be said about textual representation.


> It is trivial dealing with 10,000 lines of code, but if you have a
> million lines of code, you have no other way but summarize some of
> the information into some diagrams if you want to communicate them
> effectively. (Unless of course, you want to stuff them into 100-D
> matrixes).

It is not obvious how diagrams would communicate this _abstraction_
significantly more effectively than a corresponding reduction
utilizing text symbols.  The key isn't necessarily a diagram it is the
abstraction.  Whether communicated via a picture or textual symbols,
or for that matter a set of sounds or texture or what have you.
Mathematics has done this sort of thing for millenia.

At the end of the day, nothing that's been said here or in the many
other places I've read and examined on this subject, is in any way
convincing that diagrams, by their nature, somehow capture and/or
communicate concepts in a way that is somehow so intuitive that you
can ken the information merely by taking a quick look or something.

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
Organon Motives, Inc.
Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
jsa@organon.com

