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“I am a mother one of those old timers - started programming back in 1980. That was with an HP calculator with 15 lines of code and 8 memory registers. There were also the ‘optical cards’. You scribble your program onto cards by selecting various numbers, send them off to the mainframe, then a few days later back comes a printout. No keyboards. No monitors, and the printout just as likely to say ‘syntax error on card 3’ as it is to provide any meaningful result. Imagine, A code, run, test cycle measured in days!
I have been through almost every ‘revolution’ there has been. Several times. These new fangled technologies come and go out of fashion on roughly a 10 year cycle, just with new TLAs. I have also been responsible for pushing a fair few of them myself as well as resigning myself to ‘here we go again’.
One thing to keep in mind is the Turing Machine. Turing proved that all computers, and all languages, are equivalent. Pretty much, once they can do basic logic, then all languages have equal expressive power. Anything you can do in one, you can do in another. So arguments about procedural vs OO vs Functional are moot. I can write an OO compiler using a procedural language and vice-versa. Not efficient, perhaps, but doable.
So what it comes down to, as mentioned in this video, are the practicalities. In practice, in a real team, with real people with real business problems and challenges. The efficiency of writing and maintaining the code. The efficiency of new hires getting up to speed and the risks of losing people with ‘the knowledge’. Building a system that is easy to adapt and extend that Ames the users/customers happy.
This video singles out ‘excessive OO’ or ‘extreme OO’ as a bad thing - in particular encapsulation. Quell surprise. Excessive anything is a bad thing!
For the comp sci students out there, just remember all these technologies are tools. To be successful in a programming career you will need to master a fair few of them. No real world problem, worth solving, can be done well with a single tool. As a wise boss said to me once, ‘this is technology. With the right tool it will go 100 times faster’. This was when I was writing my own ORM layer - not realising there was already a library to do that. Similarly, I once had 85 lines of procedural code replaced with a single line of (damn clever) SQL. Being a programmer is a bit like being a doctor. You can’t solve every problem with a scalpel. You can’t solve every problem with antibiotics. Every person is a bit different. You need years of training and a wide variety of diagnostic as well as preventative as well as curative tools, medicines, machines and hands on experience - book learning alone will not cut it.
The main factor for deciding what tools to use is the Problem Domain. One thing I have noticed, time and time again, is that the ‘best’ computer code accurately reflects the Domain it is working in. I guess it is called DDD these days. From that perspective, and getting back to the video, your encapsulation level should reflect the natural encapsulations of the domain you are working in. Though this is more of a heuristic than an absolute rule.
Let’s call it ‘Domain Oriented Heuristic’ programming or DOH programming for short. 👍”
“Alright, here goes. I’m old. What that means is that I’ve survived (so far) and a lot of people I’ve known and loved did not. I’ve lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can’t imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here’s my two cents. I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don’t want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don’t want it to “not matter”. I don’t want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can’t see. As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive. In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life. Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out. Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”