This is both an awesome story and IMHO a great example of why "scalability" and "future-proof design" and object-oriented-everything-successfully-talks-to-all-the-stuff-that-hasn't-been-written-yet are not the be all end all.
My beef: the chances that someone setting up that demo would have gone "wait, hang on, where is this actually going?" would IMO have been significantly higher in a pragmatic/imperative/monolithic design context, because that detail would have been within the scope of consideration of the application itself. CORBA just makes that sort of thing disappear into... *gestures at everything and nothing*
The whole OOP notion of normalizing components and the connections between them is just a software encoding of bureaucracy meeting the human physiological response to Dunbar's number.
It's kinda sad that "let's build the perfect object-oriented communications system" can, when squinted at from the right angle, sometimes look like The One Last Thing We Will Ever Need To Do With A Computer To Build The Good Parts Of Skynet - all we get is (for want of a better word) institutionalization instead. And as the domain-specific semantic significance of discrete pieces of information are normalized^H"abstracted" away, it becomes extremely hard to regroup that significance into that mental place where we're able to subconsciously consider and weigh things up very effectively.
(NB. The intersection of programming language design and psychology is something I find incredibly interesting, so if you disagree with the my parent comment, can see glaring flaws in it, or have otherwise constructive criticism, I would very much like to know.)
My beef: the chances that someone setting up that demo would have gone "wait, hang on, where is this actually going?" would IMO have been significantly higher in a pragmatic/imperative/monolithic design context, because that detail would have been within the scope of consideration of the application itself. CORBA just makes that sort of thing disappear into... *gestures at everything and nothing*
The whole OOP notion of normalizing components and the connections between them is just a software encoding of bureaucracy meeting the human physiological response to Dunbar's number.
It's kinda sad that "let's build the perfect object-oriented communications system" can, when squinted at from the right angle, sometimes look like The One Last Thing We Will Ever Need To Do With A Computer To Build The Good Parts Of Skynet - all we get is (for want of a better word) institutionalization instead. And as the domain-specific semantic significance of discrete pieces of information are normalized^H"abstracted" away, it becomes extremely hard to regroup that significance into that mental place where we're able to subconsciously consider and weigh things up very effectively.
I wonder what the business equivalent to OOP is?