> ... C++ *appears* to increase the cost of fixing defects ... Some additional points:
Some languages allow direct pointer manipulation which favors certain classes of bugs. This is independent of whether the language is OO, and these are probably the most costly defects to find (hanging pointers, buffer overflows, array index busting, memory leakages, etc.). Some languages have strong type checking, which reduces some classes of bugs. This is independent of whether the language is OO. Some people like to think they are OO if they wrap every incoming piece of data in get/put methods in classes. This reduces some categories of errors at the cost of flexibility. When the input format changes, the code needs serious modification everywhere. This is also independent of whether the language is OO, and is a matter of style. While python classes permit you to wrap everything, python classes are so "thin" a wrapper that it is as if they almost aren't wrapped. A trend for style would be to use OO for the methods on stable objects (a continually decreasing breed over time) and use data-driven methods to permit handling data of very flexible input formats. This trend will permit more use of techniques like XSLT, where data structures define the transformations instead of classical code, and techniques like semantical analysis using ontologies, taxonomies, thesaurii, dictionaries, and mappings of semantics into real-world contexts. In other words, data-driven software is not top-down (problem-oriented). It is also not bottom-up (object-oriented). It is simply data-oriented, and totally driven by the input data. This trend will result in the number of lines of code going down, the cost of software going down, and the consciousness of data relationships going up. We will then see Python-D, the python Data language. While Python said: "indentation of code is everything", Python-D will say: all the relational arrows in your dataflow diagram (which IS your code) must be pointing upwards. While Python said: "simplify, reduce coupling, increase cohesion of the software, and do tricks with lambda", Python-D will say: "simplify, reduce coupling, and increase cohesion of the data, and do tricks with metadata." Mike Brenner -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
