Igor Delovski Board

[XNote]

Jeff Atwood: Why Objects Suck, Revisited

"I've found that a little object orientation goes a long way. Pushing too
far into "everything must be an object" territory leads to, well, exactly
what Paul describes above-- giant masses of repetitive code that
someone is going to have to maintain."

[Ike]

Steve Yegge: Singleton Considered Stupid

"I actually use this as a weeder question now. If they claim expertise at
Design Patterns, and they can ONLY name the Singleton pattern, then they
will ONLY work at some other company."

[delovski]

Paul Graham: Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented

"There is a kind of mania for object-oriented programming at the
moment, but some of the smartest programmers I know are some of the
least excited about it."

[Guest]

Philosophical discussion on when to mark a method as virtual

"It takes only a few seconds to type the word "virtual" but you need to know what you just signed yourself up for. I'm not saying that virtual methods are bad; I'm saying that you need to understand what you are doing."

[XNote]

Smalltalk for Everyone Else

"Researchers at Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center developed
Smalltalk more than 30 years ago. It took the shape that it largely still
holds today with the release of Smalltalk-80 in 1980. Xerox provided the
ST-80 release to a small number of companies at the time, including
Apple Computer. Years later, when Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls (the
architect and lead developer of Smalltalk at PARC) were at Apple, they
wanted a system with which they could develop multimedia educational
software. They took the original Smalltalk-80 implementation at Apple
and developed a modern implementation called Squeak."

[delovski]

OOP Is Much Better in Theory Than in Practice

"Like many ideas that sound good in theory but are clumsy in practice,
object-oriented programming (OOP) offers benefits only in a specialized
context—namely, group programming. And even in that circumstance the
benefits are dubious, though the proponents of OOP would have you believe
otherwise. Some shops claim OOP success, but many I've spoken with are
still "working on it." Still trying to get OOP right after ten years? Something
strange is going on here."

[delovski]

Trying to grok OO programming. How's this approach?

"If you press two warm sugar coated jam filled donuts together on your
mouse mat you end up with a greasy sticky splodge (leaky abstraction
poorly defined interface), but if you place two donuts in napkins (clean
interface) it's easy to stick a straw between the two."

[delovski]

Practical OO at CodeGuru: Thunking in Win32

"What "Thunking" Means? In short, a thunk is a piece of memory that
contains one or more machine code instructions. This article is going to
describe a trampoline, implemented as a thunk.

What Thunks/Trampolines Are Good For? There are times when the
standard language call mechanics can't quite fill your needs. More often
than not, this is related to the calling convention and signature compatibility
of a subsystem, and specifically pointers to member functions."

***

And the folow-up: Message Only Window by the same author:

"A Message Only Window is an invisible window, created with the sole
purpose of picking up window messages. There's very little data associated
with it and obviously no painting or similar operations. It's ideal for simple
request-driven systems, where messages could be socket notifications,
alerts from other processes, or triggers for inter-thread synchronization.
There are many different scenarios where they can come in handy, one
of which I'll write about in an article of its own later."

[Ike]

BusinessWeek: SOFTWARE MADE SIMPLE, September 30, 1991

Reading this artickle realy hurts. Every sentence is pure pain: "One day
everybody will have his own personal airplane..."

"Object programming, however, "will get the industry out of the rut
we're in," says Philippe Kahn, president of Borland International Inc.

If you doubt that, consider the pending collaboration between IBM and
Apple Computer Inc. These blood rivals stunned the industry last summer
by announcing that they will work together.

Once perfected, such objects are infinitely reusable, so programmers don't
have to reinvent the wheel every time. Brad Cox, who created Objective C,
the programming language that comes with NeXT machines, predicts that
object technology will be as big an advance for the Information Age as Eli
Whitney's invention of interchangeable musket parts was in the
Industrial Age.

If my 5-year-old kid can use it, I consider it good," says Bjarne Stroustrup,
an AT&T Bell Laboratories computer scientist who invented the most popular
object programming language, C++.

The upshot is a system that can keep up with business changes. At Unum
Life Insurance Co., for example, whenever a state regulation changed in
the past, programmers for the Portland (Me.)-based insurer had to scramble.
But now, using objects, they can do such updates in one-third the time
and create software that's far more usable by nontechies, says Barby Muller,
a technology manager. In some cases, "instead of the programmers, the
business people can make changes to the software," she says."

[delovski]

Steve Yegge: Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns

"It's odd, though, that Java4 appears to be the only mainstream object -
oriented language that exhibits radically noun-centric behavior. You'll almost
never find an AbstractProxyMediator, a NotificationStrategyFactory, or any
of their ilk in Python or Ruby. Why do you find them everywhere in Java?

It's a sure bet that the difference is in the verbs. Python, Ruby, JavaScript,
Perl, and of course all Functional languages allow you to declare and pass
around functions as distinct entities without wrapping them in a class."

[delovski]

Jeff Atwood: Your Code: OOP or POO?

"I've always found inheritance hierarchies to be brittle and unstable, and
then there's the massive object-relational divide to contend with. OO seems
to bring at least as many problems to the table as it solves."

[delovski]

Findy Services and B. Jacobs: Object Oriented Programming Oversold!

"I have been programming small and medium custom business applications
for most of my career. Most of my complaints against OO are related to this
rather large niche. Perhaps OO is good for other niches; however, I cannot
really answer for other niches."

[delovski]

Are Design Patterns Missing Language Features

"On various places, it has been claimed that use of DesignPatterns, especially
complex ones like VisitorPattern, are actually indicators that the language being
used isn't powerful enough.

Many DesignPatterns are by convention rather than encapsulable in a library or
component, and as such contain repetition and thus violate OnceAndOnlyOnce.

If it didn't contain at least some repetition, or something that could be Refactored
out, then it wouldn't be a pattern."

[XNote]

C++ FQA Lite - Frequently Questioned Answers

[delovski]

Never trust a programmer who says he knows C++

“C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by
guesswork and ignorance.”

[delovski]

Linus Torvalds - realworldtech forums - c++ productivity

"And there is a very strong "culture" of C (and UNIX, for that matter). And
this is also where it's so important for the language to be simple and un-
ambiguous. One of the absolute worst features of C++ is how it makes a
lot of things so context-dependent - which just means that when you look
at the code, a local view simply seldom gives enough context to know what
is going on."

[Ike]

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/193o4p/the_dark_side_of_c_pdf_you_lucky_firefox_19_users/