Greatest Software Ever Written 4256

In my case, it was Fortran. I had read stuff about OO before, but tended to figuratively fall asleep while reading about how dogs were a kind of animal, and other things that didn't seem to have much to do with anything I worked on.

But then John Cuthbertson gave a pitch at a standard committee meeting for adding some OO features to Fortran (they did get into F2003). John explained it in a way that made sense to me and I had 2 big reactions (and some smaller ones).

1. Like your case, I realized I had been using those ideas for ages (about the same as your 20 years, in fact), but hadn't realized that the buzzwords and what I had been doing amounted to the same thing.

2. It hadn't previously occurred to me that the language could help me instead of get in the way, but I saw how I could use the proposed language features to do the same things as I had done before, but much more cleanly.

The smaller reactions were the result of being able to use the new (to me) terms to help me understand how to make some improvements in the way I had been doing things. Yes, I had been using some of the ideas, but the new light did help me see additional aspects of them.

-- Richard Maine Good judgment comes from experience; email: my first.last at org.domain experience comes from bad judgment. org: nasa, domain: gov -- Mark Twain