The new culture of software development

bject-oriented design is an old idea and a new idea. The basic concepts have been around for almost twenty-five years, time for more than a few generations when mea­ sured against the rate of evolution of the computer industry. Only recently, how­ ever, have object-oriented techniques been exposed to enough people and applied to enough projects to yield a concrete idea of the practical power, benefits, and require­ ments of the method. This column, adapted from an earlier article, 1 describes some of the issues that arise when the object-oriented approach is implemented on a significant scale. It argues that object-oriented techniques, as represented by Eiffel, imply a new culture of software development, and studies how this new culture can, for the time being, coexist with the old. The basis for this discussion is the ob­ servation of many applications, developed in quite diverse contexts - some by peo­ ple working with me, others without any direct involvement on our part.