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Message:

Breaking the ice

Posted by Bill Venners on 15 Apr 1998, 12:14 PM

I have a theory that no one wants to be first in a discussion
group. The purpose of this post is to break the ice.

I got one e-mail from a reader, who pointed out that coupling
does indeed have an analog in writing, contrary to what I
said in my JW article, "What's a method to do?". Any time a chuck of
text refers to another chunk of text explicitly, or if one
chunk simply requires another chunk as context before the
first chunk can be fully understood, those chunks are coupled.

I agree, but it ocurred to me that in writing, minimal coupling
doesn't seem to be such a concern as it is in programming.
Perhaps because written text doesn't need to be edited and
changed like code does. Maximizing cohesion is important to
both code and text because cohesiveness helps make things
understandable. In general, both code and text need to be
understandable as much as possible. But only code needs to
be easily changed, and so I think that's what minimizing
coupling primarily addresses. The less coupling you have,
the few ripples your changes will have (the fewer other
things you'll have to change because of your original changes).

bv