I’m having some self-referential fun as I simultaneously learn the “concept” concept, and view @dnj’s 1-Dec-2021 ACM talk via On24’s webinar software running in the Microsoft Edge browser.
For example, when I pause the talk to come to this forum, sooner or later I get a message there that the webinar has ended. In one sense true but not what the designer intended – the live webinar ended 4 days ago! I’m watching a recording. In another sense, false, as I press in the browser and, thankfully, it remembers where I left off so I can continue.
There are actually two applications, each with their designer’s concept, serving me here – the webinar software and the browser. Well. When the webinar software designer designed their software, did they know the browser’s concepts? I doubt they were in direct communication with the Edge designer at Microsoft. So they were probably acting as Edge users – making up their own mythical interpretation of how the browser works when hosting the webinar software.
Given that most software usage scenarios take place with software X running inside software environment Y, is there hope for reasonable interaction between X’s concepts and Y’s concepts?
Referring to the question, “Given that most software usage scenarios take place with software X running inside software environment Y, is there hope for reasonable interaction between X’s concepts and Y’s concepts?” I thought the concept of software X would have to include its context of use, which - in my view - is its environment (e.g.: user; conditions of use; environment Y). If X and Y are pre-existing, then, before applying X within Y, one would have to check X running within Y can provide the intended behavior.
Hi Sushil – Welcome to the forum! I think concepts should help a lot in reconciling incompatibilities between software packages that get integrated, because (1) they lead to more modularity so you can more easily figure out which parts of the code base you’re interacting with; (2) they encourage more explicit definitions of behavior; (3) they are defined to be independent of their environments; (4) by favoring reuse of familiar concepts, concept design reduces the degree of variability and compositions between different concepts can be standardized across platforms.
Hi and welcome to the forum! I suspect that what’s going on here might be an example of what I call “overloading”, in particular overloading by “piggybacking” (EOS, pp. 136–139). There are two completely separate concepts, one of a webinar and the other of a recorded talk. The design seems to have merged the two into a single concept, piggybacking the second onto the first. So the recording aspects get messed up with messages and actions that should only be associated with a live webinar.