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issue: #3

 

More Snake Oil?

More opinions on Dermot Hogan's Bytegeist column: OOPS! or: Where Did Object Orientation Go Wrong?

Sir,

I found an apparent contradiction in Chris Rimmer's editorial reply to the Bytegeist article. Chris suggests that the fault of the OOP system not being able to handle the addition of reconciliation was caused by not understanding the business requirements well-enough UP FRONT rather than a failure of OOP itself. However, he later makes anecdotal claims that OOP helps "in reducing development time by making the system more robust against changing requirements..."

A request to add reconciliation certainly sounds like a "changing requirement" to me. One never knows what will be requested of a system in the future.

Bryce Jacobs


Sir,

Dermot Hogan says "What I’d done was to modify the behaviour of a base class. And this behaviour had then propagated with effortless ease through the whole damned system."

If you don't use OOP and change some function, which can be called from anywhere, isn't there the same problem? Could you explain why this is related to OOP? I agree, OOP is not perfect, but I think this problem can occur on every system, which allows you to call subroutines.

Jens Gruschel


Smalltalk

Sir,

Many thanks for the Smalltalk tutorial. I struggled to learn Smalltalk some years ago but could never get very far. I’m not sure why but I think it was all that stuff about ‘sending messages’ that baffled me. It was good to get to grips with the language again. Your tutorial was a big help and I really found myself enjoying writing Smalltalk code this time around. I hope you’ll continue with your Smalltalk coverage in future!

Danny Weston


The Strange Death of Visual Basic

Sir,

Congratulations on The Strange Death of Visual Basic by Dermot. My only comments would be that picking on GoSub as a specific case may close many minds. I have experience of many languages -- writing compilers for some -- and so I know to avoid GoSub because of portability issues. Our code deliberately has zero instances of this construct.

However, instead of considering the plight of a company with 100,000 lines, try 10 times that, much of which relies of COM apartment threading, custom shared-memory mechanisms, COM's "deterministic finalisation", interfaces to Windows Services and other features which require access to true VB run-time support (not the VB.NET variations), and a proper Variant data type, otherwise we lose that compatibility.

Although we're relatively successful, we're also pretty small. We're struggling to find the money and resources to re-design our products (not just do a syntax port) for the .NET environment. Continued support for the old code base also means duplicating Development, QA, Support, and Documentation effort until such a time as all our customers have switched. Given all these headaches, VB.NET will be our last choice of a target language, assuming we manage the transition of course.

Name withheld by request

 


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