Horst Herb wrote:
> I am a strong believer in the UNIX philosophy of having one well designed tool for
>each single small job (if the job is large, break it down into smaller ones), that
>does nothing but this single small job - but that exceptionally well. It is up to the
>user uinterface to bind all these small tools together to a functional entity. This
>is a truly modular way to develop software, and makes it extremely easy to debug and
>to share a project development between many people. In such a concept, it does not
>matter either in which language each of the modules has been written.
Pity Bill rewrote history and made 90% of everybody unlearn this, and retard the
progress of computing by 10 years....
> In GNUMed, only the Interbase backbone is rather monolitic. The rest of it is not.
>It's several dozen of inter-communicating modules which are best used through a GUI
>(or web browser, if neccessary) - but each of them is still functional on their own.
>One program deals with identity/demographic related data. One with drugs and
>interactions. Another one with progress notes, and so on. Looks very chaotic and
>confusing at the beginning, especially as long as documentation is lacking - but is
>extremely stable on the long run.
How far progressed is your demographic stuff by the way? I can potentially contribute
an Eiffel model for health demographics (not yet finished of course).
> There is a strong advantage in this approach of independend cooperative modules, and
>the advantages of OO become less and less obvious the smaller the "applets" get - so
>it really doesn't matter any more which language, you are not even constrined by the
>OO paradigm. Everybody can use the language they are most experienced infor their
>little niche program, I use C(++) or Pascal, because that's what I have been using
>for 20 years. I can write in Fortran, Java, Modula, Forth, Perl, Tcl/Tk and some
>others (Tom, I am even learnig Eiffel now! ;-)) ) - but the code will be rather
>amateur like.
(recovers from fainting attack, reseats himself at desk)
Yes and no. THe GEHR kernel is about as small as I would want to go, since it
corresponds to the idea of an EHR. And there will be a few hundred classes in there
when we are finished. I would not want to program this in a non-OO language. But for
the peripheral bits and pieces, I agree. PERL, gross as it is, is good for glue.
- thomas beale
