August 9, 2006

Misunderstanding Object Orientation

I ran across this post by Steve Holstad of Clarity Consulting where he points out a post by Jeff Atwood on Coding Horror where Jeff makes some comments about how OO is many times oversold and even goes so far as to agree with others that pushing too far into OO generates "giant masses of repetitive code".

I feel that this can't be further from the truth.

Maybe if "pushing too far into OO" means not leveraging OO properly and following proper design. The entire point and one of the main benefits of good OO reuse of code, reducing or at least limiting repetitive code.

What I have found from the anti-OO crowd that I have run across professionally is that they simply don't understand proper OOD/OOP. Maybe all that is needed is education and not abandoning a great software engineering cornerstone.