[SystemSafety] The Fosse of Babel

[clayton at veriloud.com]

> Yes. UML according to the as-published specs has semantic holes in it large enough to fly a 747 through. Appendix L of the book is an attempt to patch as many of those holes as possible. Without that patching, I agree, UML is fairly useless.

It’s worse than useless in the wrong hands, and the wrong hands are prodigiously numerous.

I was at Rational from 89-91 before they sold their soul to IBM/C++.  I came there because of success with two so-called programming-in-the-large Ada projects that were very successful, and Rational had the best Ada IDE in the world. I was also there during early development of Booch notation, the precursor to UML.  All it was meant to be, and Grady Booch early on agreed, was a way to express and communicate in a common symbolic was, design.  Think whiteboard talk.   Then marketing took over, and it became "formal high level auto coding C++/OO” snakeoil. They were rewarded greatly for this (after I left and flushed my stock down the toilet of course, my luck - which makes me completely biased). 

> 
> “Besides, I think it is a fundamental mistake to have the notion of "object" as an organising principle for expressing requirements and designs. Abstract data types are fine.”

I disagree with the word “fundamental” here, its a very useful concept if used appropriately, but yeah, the hierarchical "structs with methods on top” way of thinking, ugh, in pics even, can lead to such incredible complexity in those wrongs hands the world would have been much better off without it. 

BTW, note Alan Kay said "I made up the term "object- oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.” He was not joking, but elaborating on this would lead into design/language wars deja vu which I don’t think this list deserves.

- Clayton Weimer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/weimer/ <https://www.linkedin.com/in/weimer/> 
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