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by Jonathan Crossland.
Original Post: The Concept of Non Contractual interfaces
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Our software contract world is the accepted norm, and of course we have come a long way with the philosophy as its been the corner stone of our development languages and platforms for how long.
However, other concepts have also existed. In the seemingly archaic world of top down programming, there were no interface or object-oriented contracts. Instead a form of duck-typing and vtable calls ruled the day or even worse pointers and addresses.
Today the concepts of interface and implementation etc are sometimes lost on the new generation of developers, as its so seamless today.
However, I think that if you look at the real world, communication is lossy, and not defined by the same kind of rules.
In the real world we kind of just make sure there is someone around, or get the person focused on us, then we talk. The receiver understands or does not understand, or does not listen, or hears and acts on all that is said. In the real world, not every communication has "roger", "over and out". There are obvious benefits to having it sometimes, but a real pain in other situations.
The interaction of software frameworks is a real candidate for a more lossy communication, or a Communication Agent, put in software terms. The ability to translate messages from "intention to result" is imperative.
When a call is made to string GetUserName() or string getNameOfUser, the intention is the same, but in our current forms of software architecture, a human would have to use a design pattern, Adaptor, Bridge or whichever suited to accomplish it, when clearly, to our human eyes, the function could well be identical but for name.
A new kind of Interface Definition language is needed to declare intentions of interfaces, and allow a mapping agent to successfully arbitrate a result.
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