by Paul Freeman
It didn't happen, of course. The information-gathering capability of the IT industry has increased exponentially since the advent of AI, but people continue to do nearly all the thinking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said man could be defined as "an intelligence served by organs." AI has quietly become an organic part of many high-tech endeavors, such as robotics, manufacturing, and document scanning. And while AI was scanning and measuring, people were thinking of new processes, some of which are now replacing AI at the top of the "hot trends" list.
While fads don't often build on their initial fame, one recent IT trend -- object technology (OT) -- promises to remain a force long after it loses "fad" status. Support for OT is growing rapidly, as software development becomes more involved and subject to greater time pressures. The concept is taking hold, and object is becoming a media buzzword.
Head Of The Class
OT was effective and had a devoted following before it became a trend; the technology seems to have real staying power. The reason for that prognosis is simple: It works.
IBM, with the largest programming community in the world, has moved quietly to the forefront among object technologists and has a growing corporate commitment to it, spearheaded by the establishment of an innovative training program, the Object Technology University (OTU).
IBM established the OTU to assure a cohesive worldwide OT training approach. With multiple programs and levels, OTU can help smooth OT integration into an enterprise while addressing the unique needs of different audiences, including business executives and managers, system and application analysts, designers, and programmers. There are three programs in OTU:
The OTU Residency Program -- started in IBM's consulting and development communities more than two years ago -- has expanded to include students from the company's worldwide client list. IBM trained more than 20,000 people worldwide in object technologies in 1995.
Listen to one OTU Residency alumnus, Jim Williams of USAA, a San Antonio, TX-based insurance and financial management company, talk about his five-week School One immersion course at OTU in Atlanta, GA. "I like to go out and tell the world about it, because it's the most phenomenal thing I've encountered in my career," Williams says. That's high praise indeed from someone who's been a data-processing professional for more than 20 years.
Another OTU graduate is Bruce Ambler, a teacher for AT&T's Information Technologies organization in New Jersey. "One of my conclusions is that object-oriented programming is both evolutionary and revolutionary," Ambler says. "You can view object technology as a natural evolution and think of objects as the ultimate subroutines. But it enables people to do very revolutionary things."
Such as?
Such as bringing the best methodology of hardware design to software creation. At its simplest, OO programming involves the creation of exportable modules. Where traditional code programmers might labor for days, weeks, or months to create a "checkbook" for a data package, the OO method is to create one checkbook that can be used whenever one is needed.
OO doesn't amount to plug-and-play in programming, but it's a giant step toward increasing productivity by freeing programmers from rote tasks.
One of the more daunting problems with OT is describing it. It isn't palpable, even though its results are demonstrably so. Williams quotes a down-home OT description he heard at a conference on object technology, a description that uses milking a cow as an analogy to object-oriented programming. The programmer/farmer has three options. Milk the cow. Make the cow an object and tell the cow to milk itself. Or declare milk an object and instruct it to de-cow itself.
While any choice but the first would be an utter failure in the dairy industry, the choices represent a straight-line success in programming. Why string together "spaghetti" code to represent "milk" when someone has done it before?
While Williams is an OTU missionary, his level of involvement with OTU isn't all that unusual. In fact, School One C++ classes held through October 1995 as part of the OTU Residency Program resulted in a net satisfaction index of more than 98 percent for the course and instructors. Anyone who has ever taken or taught a class in anything will agree that approval ratings like that are nothing short of phenomenal.
AT&T's Ambler is a computer professional who hasn't been a full-time programmer for some 20 years. Ambler left a comfortable professorship at the University of Texas at Arlington campus to join Bell Labs in Linwood, NJ, as a technology manager. Attending OTU class in Atlanta, GA, was a novel experience for Ambler, in that the course seemed to pyramid on skills he hadn't put to specific use for almost a generation.
Object Lessons
Ambler found that the Residency Program's approach of immersing students in objects provided a smooth transition for programmers. "The total immersion approach of the school works, and works well," Ambler says.
Total immersion means just that. OTU residency students spend five days a week in class -- with homework assigned every evening -- for a multiweek class session. Students are shielded from everyday distractions such as ringing telephones.
Ambler has exported his OTU training to classes at Bell Labs, where he conducts primer classes on the OT mind set. Most of his students embrace the idea quickly; there are only a few, he says, who would be perfectly content to continue doing what they've been doing for years, and do it the same way. "It's somewhat disruptive to them that they won't be able to start work from the tabula rasa...the blank slate," Ambler says.
Efficiency-minded managers have some rethinking to do if they are to make full use of OT. Management teams are accustomed to designing projects from a blank slate.
But there is considerable financial incentive for change. For example, USAA's Williams believes a companywide implementation of OT just might offer the single largest payback that computer technology can bring to his company.
OTU instructors cover the panoply of programming, but do so with an underlying agenda that equates to that of a good language instructor. In a typical school or university environment, students can be pronounced completely proficient in a foreign language when they can think in that language. Students at OTU are tested on attaining specific skills, but the goal is instilling Object Think.
In 1995, OTU Residency School One courses were conducted in Belgium, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Australia, China, and the U.S.
One widely traveled OTU professor is Dr. Joseph Green, who has an office in Boston, MA, but spends most of his time on the road. One of a core group of more than 30 object experts in the U.S. who become "professors" wherever OTU classes are held, Green finds OTU classes as stimulating as do the students.
"Traditionally, programming is very much tied to procedures aimed at a sequence of events to solve a particular problem," Green says. "Object technology looks at things differently. It says, let us first model in software all the pieces of the company so we will have programs that represent reports, that represent physical items, that represent people.
"We do all of that first, and then the development of applications will be quite simple...tying together the right pre-existing pieces...those pieces are the objects."
Green says OTU is an exciting teaching environment because the students are involved and professional and the promise of success is so great. He says only a few traditional programmers have demonstrated initial problems with the different way of thinking.
OTU offers a multifaceted approach for supporting an organization's software technology advancement. The Residency Program, in particular, is a team learning environment for "immersion" in object thinking.
Schools Of Thought
OTU School One, available in both Smalltalk and C++ languages, provides a focused and intensive learning experience for application developers new to object orientation. A five-week residency program, School One immerses students in an object environment and accelerates the development of foundational skills in object technology and programming. School One also introduces students to visual programming and the basics of object-oriented analysis and design.
An integrated set of classroom lectures, discussions, case studies, and guest speakers is reinforced with hands-on exercises, team and individual projects, and reading assignments, to prepare students to participate as programmers on object-oriented application development projects.
OTU School Two -- a multiweek residency program -- focuses on the skills needed to be an effective OO designer and team leader on a consulting engagement or development project using object technology. The course focuses on developing skills in two areas, the technical aspects of leading OO analysis and design work and issues related to team leadership.
Instruction in these two areas is integrated; each part of the course includes knowledge and practice, focusing on a mix of technical and leadership skills related to the activity. For instance, when the technical skills needed for object-oriented analysis are taught, the practice of facilitating a team to perform the task and techniques for reviewing the resulting models are also covered. In this way, the School Two experience more closely mirrors the real world of application development with object technology, which the students experience on the job.
"School Two looks beyond the practical learning of School One to find leadership qualities," says Susan Lilly, a course developer in IBM's education and training organization, the group responsible for OTU. According to Lilly, lead designer of the School Two curriculum: "Creating top-notch OT team leaders and designers requires a lot of independent learning from the students that they must then turn around and teach to other students."
OT programming is the future of programming for many reasons. No one wants a program that does less and there is simply no time for the blank slate to blossom into a commercially successful program in today's supercharged marketplace.
So, those who want to make programming their life's work will concentrate on OT. American industrialist Charles Kettering put it well, when he said, "We should all be concerned about the future. We'll be spending the rest of our lives there."