Ted Neward makes an interesting obervation, namely that just about every new IT/software thing has claimed enables reuse. That's a good observation, although I disagree with the conclusion. He thinks the problem isn't about enabling reuse.
I think that it is, it's just that none of the solutions out there help address the real problem. In fact, I think we're collectively so far off base on really enabling reuse that we don't even exactly understand the problem yet. We certainly know the symptoms, but we're only taking stabs at the dark at ways to fix them. If you re-use, you get more complexity from writing more general code. If you go from scratch or adapt an existing approach, you get complexity from excessive duplication.
So maybe lack of ability to reuse things is really just a symptom of the incredible complexity of all this, which is the real heart of the problem.
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