On 11/05/2011, at 10:25 PM, Paola Kathuria wrote:
>
> 2) is a call to an existing function "re-use"?
>
> I've been the PHP developer for the-racehorse.com since 2006 and
> have produced over 30,000 lines of code. However, I'm calling
> some functions written earlier in new code? Is that counted as
> re-use?
Yes.
>
> 3) is using an open-source CMS code "re-use"?
Yes.
>
>
> 4) Is using a CMS "re-use"?
>
> This year I'm working as a contractor as "Drupal Developer". Drupal 6.*
> is such that most site builds consist of going through configuration
> forms created by third-party modules. I'm working on a multi-lingual
> site but I've only written 500 lines of code and that's for managing
> custom login with cookies. I don't think that spending days installing
> and configuring modules in forms is development. But is it software
> re-use?
If you are using software that was not developed for the project at
hand, it is re-use, whether you can see the code or not.
>
> 5) Fashion changes
>
> Over time, people's choice of programming language evolve. PHP,
> Python, Ruby on Rails, Java, you name it.
>
> Software re-use presumably assumes a consistency of language.
The implementations of these languages themselves re-use a lot of
code, and many of them provide ways to pull in compiled code. In
2005, "PJE on Programming" wrote:
But it's the impure libraries that give (C/J/Iron)Python
most of its current value! Be it database access, number
crunching, interfaces to GUI toolkits, or any of a thousand
other uses, it's the C, Java, or CLR libraries that make
Python useful. CPython is basically a glue language for
assembling programs from C libraries, and to the extent
that Jython and IronPython are successful, it's because
they're glue languages for assembling Java or CLR components.
Once upon a time I used to moan to classes about how little reuse we
did; now we have so much to reuse that a major part of our effort is
*finding* the stuff (and yes, installing/configuring once found).
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