Moving Forward

The whole issue of dividing your software into chunks, pieces, globs, parts, and all-out guts spilled all over the hard drive can make for a usability nightmare. In this chapter I talked about the nightmares of DLLs, whether to use static libraries instead of DLLs, how to name your libraries, and how to work with versions. In the final section I showed you how to create a useable library for other developers. Can you believe how much usability transcends all aspects of programming, right into the development of libraries? Most people don’t realize that, and that’s why we, as users, get stuck with such a mess when we install other people’s software on our computers.

In the next chapter I finally talk about a topic dear to many of our hearts: object-oriented programming, or OOP. Since I’ve already convinced you that library development has usability issues, you can probably imagine that I make a pretty good case for OOP also having usability issues. (I’m everywhere and I’m not going away!) See you there.