NYCPHP Meetup

[John Zabroski]

There is nothing "abstract" about what I just said.  There is NOTHING pretentious about saving time.  Time is money; that is CONCRETE business terms.  Rapid, high-quality work is what makes workers more valuable than their peers.  I don't know what can be more concrete than saving time, and I also don't understand what's harmful about being abstract.  When programming, it's about getting things done correct, explicit, and fast.  That might mean you need to be abstract or you need to be concrete.

Very few programmers should build a solution from the ground up, and we all use off-the-shelf components somewhere to save time.  For example, there's nothing pretentious about using a database to store data.  A database is an off-the-shelf program that stores data.  If that off-the-shelf solution can pay for itself in three years, then guaranteeing yourself a positive return on investment is a sound, concrete decision.

An object-oriented framework saves time, or it sucks and no one would use it.  That is the major benefit: saving time.  Come to that, most people don't view the language as the time saver but instead view the framework as the time saver.  Most people don't "pick OOP", they pick a framework that addresses a problem application domain.  There is nothing "abstract" about this benefit.  I put myself in the direct pathway of the consequences my decisions have.

I find the notion that polymorphism is arbitrarily beneficial to certain projects to be very "abstract" and also forcing a technology instead of a solution.  It makes it sound like there is a "Ghost in the Machine", when there is none.

Off-topic: Aren't you an adjunct professor at SUNY Potsdam?

Edward Potter <edwardpotter at gmail.com> wrote: When it get to this abstract level, just think of objects as cells &
functions as peptides carrying messages (variables) to hungry
mitochondria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion) waiting to
be fed to make those cells work for you. If you have all your code
working correctly, you'll be able to Interconnect them all and you'll
get a Paris Hilton - or something like that. :-)

Then take 2 Prozac, and re-boot . . .

ed  (works for me)

On 9/30/07, John Zabroski  wrote:
> The benefit of object-orientation is message dispatch.  Objects are peers.
> They define what to do, not how to do it.  Delegation of responsibilities is
> therefore way more dependable a concept than simply polymorphism.  If the
> notion of a network of inter-cooperating agents working together to
> accomplish a task resembles your task, then objects might make sense.
>
> Polymorphism isn't why object-oriented frameworks are successful.  In
> general, frameworks are successful because the problem application domain
> was well understood before it was ever translated into code.  Frameworks
> tend to address a vertical line of business (some ill-defined problem
> application domain) or a horizontal line of business (i.e., security).
> Frameworks are also successful because they usually glue together
> off-the-shelf software in interesting ways that rapidly solve problems.
>
>  Also, if you want to make your code to be very simple, then just obey the
> first rule of programming: figure out what you want to say before you figure
> out how to say it.  Meaningful abstractions can never be crafted in the
> absence of a well-defined context.
>
> Programming language concepts don't make programming simple.  Deep,
> penetrating knowledge of the problem application domain makes programming
> simpler.  Having a language that you can easily translate that knowledge
> into is also a boon, just as having off-the-shelf software that you can glue
> into your architecture is a boon.
>
>
> Michael B Allen  wrote:
>  OOP provides one major benefit - polymorphism. If you don't need
> polymorphism, you should not be using OOP. But in some cases
> polymorphism can make your code very simple and yet highly extensible.
> It *can* be extremely powerful.
>
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