A Meeting with "Gill Bates"
Posted by Rick DeNatale Fri, 15 Jun 2007 20:27:00 GMT
A recent thread on ruby-core which touches on the issues of subclassing prompts me to tell another war story.
Back in the late-1980s to early 1990s, the software industry was starting to warm to the possibilities of object-orientation. I’d gotten to be seen as one of the experts on OO inside IBM so I found myself in a series of interesting meetings, but inside IBM and with other companies.
That’s how I found myself at the headquarters of a well-known company in the Seattle area which at that time was one of IBM’s major partners. This company was the major supplier of IBM’s operating systems for personal computers. I don’t want to give too many hints, so I’ll give a pseudonym to the CEO, let’s just call him “Gill Bates”, and I’ll refer to the company as “BigSoftware” or “BS” for short.
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