Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Aside from Brooks’s Law, Fred Brooks is also famous for another so-called “law” in software engineering: the No Silver Bullet argument.
There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.
- Encapsulate what varies.
- Favor composition over inheritance.
- Program to interfaces, not implementations.
- Strive for loosely couple designs between objects that interact.
- Classes should be open for extension but closed for modification.
- Depend on abstractions. Do not depend on concrete classes.
- Only talk to your friends.
- Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
- A class should only have one reason to change.
Continuing from the basics of OO, we now move on to its principles. The list above is taken from the wonderful book Head First Design Patterns and it enumerates some of the most important principles in OO. I’ll explain briefly what each principle means below the cut.
Agile: In A Flash is a great source of software engineering tips regardless if you’re planning to go agile or not.
Out of the many flash cards in that site, I find the two cards above to be the most important to a novice software developer. It should make them feel less surprised when Brook’s Law or Hofstadter’s Law hits them from out of nowhere.
In this day and age, knowing one programming language is not enough to develop software.
Take for example web development. You need to know at least 3 different languages to write a web application:
Of course, these are just the bare bones of a web application. More practical web apps require the developer to know more technologies:
Developing for corporate clients require even more technologies:
As you may already have read in my previous posts, one of my biggest pet peeves in the IT industry today is that a lot of people are using Object Oriented Programming (OOP) without even understanding the basic concepts behind it. They’re not using OOP for its benefits over the previous generation’s simple structured procedural programming; they’re using it simply because the language they’re coding in is OOP (e.g. Java, .NET).
To put it bluntly, it’s like writing spaghetti code in a structured programming language.
With this being my perspective about the local status quo, I feel that I have to post about the basics of OOP before moving on to the other fun stuff related to programming.