Monday, April 23, 2012

Anti-if workshop #4

During the last weekend I have attended an intense three days workshop lead by Francesco Cirillo on the importance of objects in Object Oriented Programming. Maybe you're reckoning it should be obvious, after all the name states it crystal clear.

Yet, too often we (at least I do) translate the concept to something we could call Class Oriented Programming. Don't get me wrong, classes are good, but only to evaluate the design after we have carefully and thouroghly worked with objects, scenario after scenario. Classes can be confusing, because they solve many different problems: they actually consolidate all the objects that solve each scenario. Then we must start from objects, which means that we should start with a single scenario.

So what is an object?

An object is not only "state and behavior", as we often hear. An object is an instance of a class, but this definition does not add anything to our knowledge (and moves the focus back on classes, where we don't want to keep it).

We used a phenomenological definition: an object is characterized by a series of operations that operate on the object itself and by a state that keeps track of the effects of the said operations (please help me to rewrite it avoiding the pun).

What did I learn? I did not learn to truly think with objects, as three days are not enough to overcome many years of bad habits (I can see clearly now the rain has gone), but I learned that I must strive to do it. And I have some more tools in my shed, even if I have to learn how to use them properly :-)

In a few words, the workshop was completely different from what I was expecting, but I suppose it's been much more effective this way. If I survive from all the homeworks Francesco gave us, I'll plan to write more about it.

I have joined Anti-IF CampaignMeanwhile, join the anti-if campaign as I did a long time ago.

Thanks again to Francesco and to all the brilliant guys I had the luck to meet there... looking forward to meeting you all soon!

Another Grand Slam for Wales

I know, I know... I'm late, very late, way too late. Nevertheless, I could not let it pass :-) I only wonder what would have happened if Wales beat France in the world cup semi-final...