🦋 On reinventing the wheel
When I was new to programming, in 1994 or '5 -- when OLE was a pretty freshly minted technology -- one of the projects I was working on was a way to abstract the functionality of some of my company's libraries into a common interface so that a program could load any of the libraries dynamically at runtime, based on a string key. I came up with the stunning realization that the interface could be expressed as a pure virtual C++ base class. All the libraries had to do was to export a function called "Create_x" which would instantiate an object whose class inherited interface x. This seemed to me like an awesome bit of innovation. By funny coincidence, another project I was working on around the same time was converting some of the company's VBX controls to OCX. (I don't think the term "ActiveX" had even been coined yet, but regardless we were not using it.) I wasn't reading the documentation of OLE very closely, relying on Microsoft's compiler to do most of the work for me; so it wasn't until a month or so later that I realized I had just reinvented a subset of OLE, and that I could have used OLE's framework to give my design a little more robustness. But whatever, the feeling that I was doing something new and inventive was payoff enough. So why this now? Well, I've been doing some pretty intensive design work in coming up with the database that supports this blog ("READIN 2.0", I am calling it in my head), and I have come up with a pretty cool idea. It seems innovative to me because it is something I've never heard of anyone doing; but I am not at all schooled in database design. I will write it up later on or tomorrow, and hopefully somebody will write back to me and let me know who invented it and where I can find out more.
posted evening of Monday, October 8th, 2007
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