David Intersimone is the Director for Developer Relations at Borland. He is the author (and presenter) of a videotape series put out by Borland on object oriented programming and C++. I was looking forward to his talk, since I have been spending a little of my spare (ha!) time trying to move to C++ from C.

He had one very large problem in his presentation: he used a lot of jargon from the OO community without explanation. The result was that if you understood what he was talking about, you already knew much of the material and he was simply preaching to the choir. If you didn't already have some exposure to C++ and OO, then he might just as well have been speaking Martian.

The talk opened up with lots of rahrah noise concerning why C++ is great:

• C++ implements type checking, while K&R C does not
• C++ gives you programmer-defined datatypes
• C++ gives you GUI compatibility (with an appropriate object library -- which is just like saying Easytrieve can compute global weather patterns, with an appropriate subroutine library)

One thing C++ is supposed to be strong in is code reuse. A routine you code in C++ is supposed to be easy to reuse without error in other systems. An interesting statistic that David Intersimone brought out is that Japanese code reuse is well above that of the United States: something like 50% compared to 25%.

He presented lots more basic stuff: what is inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism. Again, if you knew what he was talking about, you didn't need to know. Otherwise, he was over your head.

A C++ development effort has something for everyone on your staff. The untrainable coder beaver who has no interest or inclination to learn OO design can be put to work doing low-level member functions, and not have to worry about OO at all. "Lone Rangers" (trainable types who work well by themselves but have problems in a team) can be dispatched to write low-level object classes. "Team Players" can do high-level code, with lots of reuse.

Case studies were undertaken of new development efforts in C++. The efforts that worked all had at least one expert on the staff and group study sessions. There was an organized educational effort.

Cases that didn't work well had people who stumbled along with books and lots of offline experimentation. They were winging it and the project suffered.

Intersimone says to budget 40% to 60% more time for the design phase in a project using OO technologies. Object oriented design is top-heavy, more time is spent in the design phase and less time in implementation.