For those you that listened to the latest .NET Rocks episode, attention was called to an article by Richard Mansfield entitled, “OOP is much better in theory than in practice”. Apparantly, my reputation preceeds me because two of my friends immediately asked me if I was going to respond to this article. Well, let me say that I shouldn't even dignify its contents with a response, but after a couple of very deep breaths and overcoming the desire to start signing up to porn and casino sites with his email, I decided a few words needed to be said - I'll be brief. Technology is about evolution. When the concept of object-oriented programming surfaced, it revolutionized the way programmers designed and coded. Like every design technique we use today, more abstraction comes with a learning curve, but you always gotta ask yourself if the benefits outweigh the costs. This gentleman is saying that OOP is too complicated for most scenarios and makes code more difficult to manage. I suspect that his preferred method of code reuse is cut-and-paste. OOP was the next logical evolutionary step for programming, just like structured programming evolved from the mess that spaghetti code caused. I'm not gonna go any further because I don't have to convince anyone out there that this gentleman is just plain wrong. I think this article is an attempt to plant some kind of abstract seed in people's heads and to put a philosophical twist of computer programming. It's programming! OOP works; and dispite the fact that there are many levels of complexitiy depending on how pattern-oriented you want to get, it's not rocket science. It is our art, and as artists, we 'post-machine-language' developers enjoy the constant intellectual excercise that our art engages us in. We enjoy the learning curves, and you know what? We're good at it. -- so endeth the sermon
by the way: I would never do that with someone's email - just want to make that clear