Code Reuse

From the 1960's through the 1990's, there was an emphasis on creating reusable blocks of code to make it easy to manage large code bases. The reusable blocks, ideally, could provide the foundation for new programs. The illustration is intended to help explain this at a high-level.

With so much of programming now being down for web browsers and mobile devices, code reuse has become less important than in previous decades. Code is expected to be junky. When there is reuse, it is likely to be through the use of large modules written by people from different organizations. This is disappointing.

While code reuse is potentially quite valuable, there are limitations. Managers need to understand that developers are building a foundation before (or while) building the main application. The managers do not understand the value. While the value is usually real, moving to a project which differs greatly from the original project often means that little code can be reused.

Note that this image is smaller and meant to be a page/slide in a presentation.