re: Objects When? If Ever?

Rob Miles — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 11:54:08 GMT

Objects are a good way of managing some kinds of solutions. They are also a good way of abstracting detal that you don't want to bother with while you do the top level design. And they are a great way to deploy related resources. But they are a horible way to teach programming. I once tried to teach programming in an "objects first" way and got a bunch of people who could draw lovely class diagrams but couldn't get anything to work. Never again.

We now spend a very big chunk of our teaching getting algorithms sorted, and then introduce objects as a solution to problems of organisation and specification.

And I always encourage my students to remember that the customer doesn't actually care what technologies you have used to make it work, they just want a happy ending.

re: Objects When? If Ever?

Mike — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 03:51:31 GMT

you're right, too many objects and interfaces clutters things up.

A middle ground I've kind of settled with now is to let objects contain

data but NOT functions..then let functions operate on the objects, not from inside the objects. In that way, objects is just a way to add new types..

So in short. use draw(monster) and not monster.draw(). I found out that Scala with it's "traits" suits this way very nice. Anyway, just my 50.