[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[Walter Stanish]

>> >> PS: My tutors thought it was a good idea to teach us ML instead of C,
>> >> thanks guys that was soooo useful!
>> > Excellent idea. It's a very different language from any you're likely to
>> > learn anywhere else, with some superb ideas in it, so it ensures that
>> > you learn at least two very different languages from different parts of
>> > the language family tree.
>> That's fine in theory but in practice, compared to the imperative coding
>> I was used and OO coding I was being introduced to I found ML so oblique
>> and practically useless as to be nothing but frustrating, plus the book
>> cost £50 I could ill afford at the time. I'm still not convinced it has
>> any use at all in the real world.
> It took me a year or two of OCaml to realize that everything I learned
> about OO was wrong and an active hindrance to writing good,
> maintainable code.  I now rarely use any OO technique.

ANOTHER ONE!  This sentiment is echoed by many (but not all) of
the veteran developers interviewed in Peter Seibel's book 'Coders at Work'.

Somewhere in there is a luscious quote about the perils of an incorrectly
conceived object system, I can't find it on line but it's words to the
effect that you want a tool but you get the tool, the tool-holder, his pet,
the conceptual notion of a being, animal, vegetable and the whole
damn jungle they're standing in, plus the effect of the tool on all of
the various materials within the forest.

It's one of the few programming books I can honestly say I really enjoyed,
basically Peter interviews a series of well known or distinguished
developers about programming as an interest, career, and field, and
what they have seen change or how they have personally changed
throughout their time, and what they see coming up in the future.

The "I don't do / get / really care for" OO notion is one that seems to
be repeated, though some of the interviewees love it, many simply
seemed to say "its only appropriate for a small problem domain".

Personally I have encountered it in many forms, and only really like
the ruby implementation for its reflectiveness.  The problem is perhaps
made worse where languages such as perl and PHP have half-baked
object systems tacked on post-facto.  And then there's the joy of
javascript... :)

- Walter
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