[geeks] rant in e minor.

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sun, 23 Jun 2002, Bill Bradford wrote:

> first.  why didnt someone TELL me that "object oriented programming" was
> nothing more than a fancy name for "re-using code modules" ?

It's not.  That's just the start of it.  It's like reusing code modules
with the ability to arbitrarily patch code and use both the patched and
unpatched code simultaneously without duplication.

Oh, and then there is the concept of "design patterns", which is where the
true (and only) beauty of OOP comes into play.  But, design patterns don't
make much sense at all until you grok OOP on a fundamental level.  A
really good book to see how this works is _Design_Patterns_ by Gamma et
al.  A copy is available at that URL I gave you yesterday that doesn't
officially exist. :)

To the cynical programmer, Design Patterns seem like intellectual fluff
that gets in the way of doing "real work", but they are essential to
getting work done efficiently in a true object-oriented programming
system.

Object-oriented programming is an entire school of thought by itself; the
problem is that it's not always presented that way, especially with
languages that were originally procedural and had objects grafted on later
(C++ and PERL, for example).  OOP's fundamental difference from procedural
programming is that, in procedural programming, you tell a machine what to
do to solve a problem; in OOP, you model the problem and "teach" the
different parts of the problem how to solve themselves.

Typically, one way will solve a problem with far more work (on the part of
the programmer) than the other, and it's the programmer's job to decide
which paradigm is more applicable.

> second.  I HATE pre-recorded greetings at drive-through fast food places.

I have yet to experience this new frontier of stupidity.

> "Hi, welcome to burger king, would you like to try $blah today?"  and then
> the person who takes your order isnt even the same person who does the
> recording.. Whats fun is this:
>
> recording: "hi welcome to burger king would you like to try $blah today?"
> me:  "yeah."
> other BK person: "uh, what?  can you give your order again please."
> me: "Yeah, I'll have one of those."

The sad part is that probably nobody saw this throughout the
implementation of this brain-dead idea.  Or the one techie who did was
fired for "not believing in the company vision" or some such bullshit.

--Jonathan