Rant about reuse
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CodeProject just highlighted an article whatever happened to reuse[^] About 16 years ago, my company made a big deal about how good it is to reuse code. The concept was clear, implementation was non-existent. Did I have a central library to pick-up the reusable code others had developed? No. Did I have somewhere to submit a piece of reusable code so the whole company could use it? No. At the time, I was using a mainframe to post HTML content to an intranet site. That wasn't easy because they didn't like to talk to each other. I built a reusable interface that would allow the web site to tell the interface code the JCL to execute whatever code they were running, where to place the report, put a placeholder site, launch the code, and redirected the user to the placeholder. The launched code would write the report to the placeholder file and the user could see it on the web. This company had 50,000 employees, as far as I know one employee reused that code several times. Basically worthless to 49,999 people. It's always possible to come across good ideas, but if your company tells you to use reusable code, it's BS. Unless they provide a venue to get and re-use code and set up standards to supply and publish searchable, reusable code. Even our mainframes were specialized, maybe 2-4,000 people could access the mainframes I was using. Just to be clear, I'm not ranting about reuse itself, it's a rant about a company that said it was a good thing and then did nothing to implement this good thing. I was the only one on my team writing web data, so I couldn't even help my own team build re-usable code. We were doing the same thing several times, but management was forcing us to use new operating systems for each new project so we really couldn't build re-usable code when the OSs wouldn't talk to each other.