Posted by Shelly on 07/26/06 01:22

"Chung Leong" <chernyshevsky@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1153849305.403652.310960@i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Kenneth Downs wrote:
>> Just for the sake of adding some balance to any conversation that might
>> arise, many people believe that adopting too much OO is a worsening of
>> bad
>> habits. It reveals itself in exactly the words you are using, "insane
>> abstraction".
>>
>> There's a great satire (that I could not find on Google) about an
>> "advancing" computer programmer. As a beginner his Hello World! programs
>> take 2-3 lines. As he gets smarter and smarter they get larger and
>> larger,
>> until it takes pages of OO-abstracted deeply nested hierarchies of
>> objects
>> just to get a gol'darn Hello World! onto the page. Very sobering stuff.
>
> Hehe. I call it the Emperor's New Coat syndrome. Even when it's plain
> to see that there is not need to wrap something in a class, people do
> it anyway because they're afraid that others will say they're stupid.
>

This is the opposite (but similar) to what I called the "Name That Tune"
syndrome in the early days of C programming. Whiz kids would compete to see
how few lines they could use to write a For loop, for example. Often, when
for readability and debugging the code should have been 10 lines, it was
written as one line by some smartass, show-off programmer.

Shelly

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