Re: [boost] good book: generative programming

From: Beman Dawes (beman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-07-12 09:40:31

Jeremy wrote:

 >A new book just came out, "Generative Programming" by Krzysztof
 >Czarnecki and Ulrich Eisenecker, Addison-Wesley. If you want to know
 >where software-design and programming will be in 10 years this book
 >will tell you! The focus of the book is on how to design reusable
 >libraries. It also has some good discussion on modern C++ techniques
 >including generic programming, and does a nice job of comparing
 >OOD/OOP with their new approach.

I bought the book on Jeremy's advice above, and have been studying it 
since.

Jeremy's comment about "where software-design and programming will be in 10 
years" may be a bit misleading; I think there are ideas in "Generative 
Programming" boost can start to use right away.

In particular,

*  Feature modeling looks like a powerful tool for designing libraries with 
lots of possible variations, such as smart pointers.  I believe feature 
modeling can be done with tools we have at hand; see 
http://www.egroups.com/files/boost/Feature+Modeling/feature_modeling.htm A 
follow-on mailing list post "Smart Pointer Feature Model" will try to apply 
these ideas.

*  Automatic or semi-automatic assembly looks like a powerful tool to hide 
the complexity implied by a library with lots of variations.  Again, smart 
pointers, for example.  And again, I think we have the tools at 
hand.  Firstly, C++ itself. C&E devote two chapters to C++ 
techniques.  Secondly, it seems to me that tools we all can use like HTML 
are powerful enough to do   automatic configuration assembly.  These ideas 
will take some time to absorb.

Thanks to Jeremy for bring this important book to our attention!

--Beman