However, I think it is important to remember that the fact that we have so much glue is a symptom of one of our biggest successes in software technology. Even as recently as the late 80s and early 90s, we just didn't have all that much to glue together, and software reuse was the holy grail, the unobtainium of computing, both in its desirability and unobtainability.
Now we have reuse. Boy do we have reuse! We have so much reuse that we need tool support to manage all the reuse. As far as I can tell, all new programming languages now come with such tooling, and are considered incomplete until they have it.
The price of success is having a new set of problems, problems you never dreamed of before.
So how will we solve these problems?
Data format adaptation, as suggested by the O'Reilly article? Yes. Model-driven approaches that allow us or our tools and languages to generate a lot of the more obvious adapter code? Sounds good, why not?
This one neat trick (click here!) that will automatically solve all these problems? No.
Simpler components, written with composability and minimization of dependencies in mind? Surely. Education, so developers get better at writing code that composes well without turning into architecture astronauts? Very much yes.
However, my contention is that developers have a hard time with this in large part because our languages only support implementing such glue, which is a start, but do not support expressing it directly, or abstracting over it, encapsulating it, playing with it. So new linguistic mechanisms like Objective-S are needed to help developers write better and thus less glue code so we can better enjoy the fruits of our reusability success.
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