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From: wware@world.std.com (Will Ware)
Subject: Re: OOP, Flavors and CLOS: or What's the big deal?
Message-ID: <E2KB7M.5FM@world.std.com>
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Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 14:35:46 GMT
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William Annis (william@brain) wrote:
: ...invitation to a language war.]

Well here we go then:

: 	I guess my larger question is "Is OOP anything more than
: syntactic sugar to make good programmer's jobs a bit easier?"

The word "programmers" is plural, and the apostrophe should go
after the "s", i.e. "good programmers' jobs".

: When I first heard about
: "Object Oriented Programming" everyone was all ga-ga over it, but
: when I got to it I didn't quite see what all the excitement was about.
: Then I thought it was ok.  Now I find I don't quite see the point again.

The big selling point was supposed to be that you could reuse source
code without rewriting it. Lots of people had lots of legacy code lying
around that seemed to work for its original intent, but when they tried
rewriting it for new applications, it usually broke. So C++ and other
OOP languages have a bag of tricks that's supposed to make any new code
reusable. One fairly cool thing that happened was that people saw they
could write large libraries of "base objects" that supplied most of the
functionality other people would want in their objects.

I've never made a big effort myself to write reusable code. Absent any
applicable experience, my impression is that the standard OOP ideas are
good, but you need to spend time planning carefully to use them well.

The publicity for OOP has certainly fizzled, I don't know if OOP itself
has done so. But C++ hype was displaced by Java hype, and Java also
claims to be an OOP language. I suspect that the rigors of writing really
reusable code are probably being widely ignored, partly due to ignorance
and laziness, but also because it takes thinking and planning, and lots
of programmers' jobs require them to throw stuff together too quickly.
The result is that there are few big OOP success stories.
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Will Ware <wware@world.std.com> web <http://world.std.com/~wware/>
PGP fingerprint   45A8 722C D149 10CC   F0CF 48FB 93BF 7289
