Reaction for: OO Lab by Andrew Schulak

I was really caught by something said sort of in passing at the bottom of page three, "We stress the importance of creating objects not to meet mythical future needs, but only under the demands of the moment." What happened to extensibility? I was under the impression that one was supposed to design with future changes in mind. And now I am told almost definitively that this is not so? Why could this be?

My first question is do the authors mean this about design in general or design by CRC cards? If they mean only when using CRC cards then it seems to me that the people using this method of design, especially beginners, might be led down an incorrect path of how design is supposed to be carried out. If they mean in general then I am totally confused.

But maybe not. It really seems to me that this whole "code reuse" ideal is just a red-herring. No one really ever intended on reusing code and that they needed some lofty inspiration to get people to use this new paradigm of thiinking so that they could make some fame and some bucks. I mean, what is design really? More over, what is good design? Does anyone really know this? It seems like an issue people hedge on all the time. Something that people will always be searching for because if they stop searching it is an admittance that there is no really good way to design because no one really cares about the mythical burden of "code reuse" anyways.

Now this is just all a hypothetical sitution taken to the extreme but what do we really know about design? Well we know that no one really knows how to teach it. No one really knows what is a great design (since everyone has their own ideas about what is good design, just listen to me and Jon go at it sometimes. :) ), and no one resuse much code at all to make creating good designs worthwhile.

So what does this all mean? I have no idea. Perhaps object-oriented programming and design is too young to hold any great expectations and that we must all keep on trudging forth ever fighting the good fight (whatever that means) to find out what OO design really is and to make the world safe for our future children who will have to use this paradigm unless we can come up with something more abstract.


Reactions


Jon:

Shoe! You weren't supposed to tell them about the OO farce!!! Robert will have to send the black helicopters after you now.


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