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From: jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)
Subject: Re: OO, C++, and something much better!
In-Reply-To: James O'Connor's message of Sun, 26 Jan 1997 08:16:12 -0700
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Date: Mon, 27 Jan 1997 23:24:55 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.c++:243527 comp.lang.smalltalk:50143 comp.lang.eiffel:17800 comp.lang.ada:56618 comp.object:60406 comp.software-eng:53054

In article <32EB753C.678B@jmpstart.com> James O'Connor <joconnor@jmpstart.com> writes:

> Curious, was the catastophe because of Smalltalk?  Or because of bad
> design/requirements analysis?

Or lousy people.  Or more to the point, feckless management.  This is
what it basically always comes down to.

> I would be more inclined to guess the
> later.  Like the Arianne V that blew up awhile back?  Wasn't that
> written in Ada?  Was it because it was written in Ada or becuase the
> designer made a mistake. I would be inclined to think it was the
> designer's fault, not the languages.

Yup.  Well, actually, again it was _management_ that decided against
certain recommendations and didn't bother requiring full scale testing
of software that had never before been tried in the environment in
which it was being "reused".


> I do, however, think that Alan's point is that some big people with a
> lot of money and a lot at stake have decided that Smalltalk is a viable
> solution for that environment.

And I would guess that under various scenarios in that environment, it
_is_.  In fact, I'd go further and say that there is undoubtedly a
class of these where it is the _best_ viable alternative.


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

