Simplifying the TAOO Explanation

[Dan Shafer]

Xavier........

> copy paste... done... no programming
> involved... Is that OOP reuse or what?

That's where one disconnect is for me. Copy-paste-done is not OO  
programming or reuse. OO programming and reuse would be more like  
create-subclass-specialize...done. In a copy-paste world if I change  
the original object, I have to find all of the places I've deployed  
copies of this group and change all of them as well. Or did I miss  
something again?

> if it is
> not clear to you or many others, I must be doing something wrong...  
> but if I
> really enjoy it's benefits since 15 years, how can I be so wrong?

It is not necessarily that you are wrong, only that you are perhaps  
so close to it that you can no longer simplify an explanation of it.

Let's try a thought experiment. Let's assume I've created a new group  
that has a button, a text field, and an option menu. The option menu  
contains as its entries the colors "red", "blue" and "orange." It has  
a script that changes the backcolor of the button when it is clicked.  
The button has a script that puts its backcolor into the field.  
Pretty simple and admittedly useless group. Assume further that it  
has other functions and capabilities beyond those on which we are  
focused.

We'll call this group colorbuttongroup. It exists on card 1 of my  
stack and its backgroundbehavior is off. On card 2 of this same  
stack, I'd like a control similar to colorbuttongroup except that  
this one that deals with and reports the forecolor of the button. In  
Smalltalk or some other OO environment, I'd subclass colorbuttongroup  
and override the two methods that deal with the color. How would I do  
this in TAOO in a reusable way so that if I ever change some other  
behavior of the colorbuttongroup object in the future, the behavior  
of the newly created group will also be modified but without any  
effort on my part and without losing the specialized behavior of the  
overridden methods?

That's about as simple an example as I can make, I think, to  
illustrate how I try to think of TAOO and find myself frustratedly  
unable to do so.




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Information Product Consultant and Author
http://www.shafermedia.com
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