Why Black Boxes are so Hard to Reuse, lecture by Gregor Kiczales

Gregor Kiczales explains why traditional black box abstractions fail for software reuse and proposes exposing implementation details through multiple interfaces.

Why Black Boxes are so Hard to Reuse: A New Approach to Abstraction for the Engineering of Software, lecture by Gregor Kiczales. The video was recorded in October 1994. From University Video Communications' catalog: "This talk presents a new abstraction framework for software systems. Unlike the traditional informal notion of "black box abstraction," in the new approach modules present multiple abstractions to their clients. One abstraction exposes functionality in the traditional way, while another exposes crucial implementation issues. A number of examples are used to show both the need for this new abstraction framework, and also that the designers of a number of existing systems have already taken steps in this direction. The lecture concludes by showing that the emerging abstraction framework is rooted in a deep similarity between computational and other forms of engineering: all are in the business of creating and controlling complex physical processes, and all need abstraction frameworks that recognize rather than try to hide this fact." Lot Number: X6636.2013 Catalog Number: 102624811