From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2005-01-29T16:07:04+09:00
Subject: Re: FYI: what's OOP's jargons and complexities?


On Sat, 29 Jan 2005, Trans wrote:

> Of course I had basically figured the jist of this out already, but
> this post states it very nicely and quite clearly. I think alot of what
> makes OOP popular is that people actually like a certain amount of
> complexity --it gives them something to do and to "know".

But OOP is there to simplify things, not complicate them. If things become
complicated then OOP is used wrong or is used for the wrong problem. The
goal of good programming is to write simple programs, not to write OOP
programs. One should map patterns of thought to patterns of mechanisms in
the most convenient way possible. Clinging to recipebooks and phrasebooks
and taking guidelines as if they were hard rules, those are things that
make verbose and clunky programs, OOP or not. Every useful mechanism can
be subverted into uselessness. OOP is simple, but teaching how to use OOP
is hard (and often not well done) because teaching how to use any set of
language constructs is hard.

> That's not to say it doesn't have some merits --it does help code
> reuse a little, but I don't know how well it really offsets the added
> hoops it creates. I recently rewrote a program something like 15 times
> before I felt like I got the "object model" right.

If you have hoops in your model then your model can be simplified, and
should, save for those hoops that are specifically there for a future
benefit of extensibility.

_____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montr�al QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju