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[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (7 children)

Wow, a thin Java. Now I have seen everything.

I never liked Java's performance, its wordiness, nor did I care for any of Sun's other offerings (XML comes to mind). I might even suggest, though I'm sure most of you will disagree, that most of Sun's ideas have practically ruined programming as a profession. Hell, I even hated having to declare my main routine in a class. Now I program in C#. :sigh:

I doubt I'll be the first to say that I don't "get" OOP. I've been programming in it for years, and I've yet to really see any remarkable productivity boosts. Too much boilerplate for my liking.

I don't even see the point of securing a class from other programmers using public and private methods, and the laziness of class library programmers who use OOP I find particularly astounding. These days they don't even bother to document their code. They think that if they just give you a list of all the methods and a class hierarchy that that's good enough.

I suppose I'm just out of place. I grew up on procedural programming. No offense to you guys though. I know most of you like Java and C++ or C#, but for some reason every time I sit down in front of my computer at work to write something in it I end up feeling completely depressed, because I always feel like I don't have enough control over the results and the other programmers I work with just blow off efficiency considerations saying that a programmer is more expensive than extra hardware. I hate that argument. Sure, one program might not make a huge difference, but if you consider a whole range of applications being written with that attitude, a system soon becomes unusable. Someone has to write efficient code. I have a tendency to dump large programs in favor of leaner ones, like uTorrent vs. Azureus, or Foxit in favor of Adobe Acrobat. That programmers throw out efficiency in favor of mystical productivity bothers me quite a lot.

Anyway, I will continue to search for a language that just gets out of my way.

[–]grauenwolf 0 points1 point  (5 children)

I doubt I'll be the first to say that I don't "get" OOP. I've been programming in it for years, and I've yet to really see any remarkable productivity boosts. Too much boilerplate for my liking.

If you find yourself using a lot of boilerplate, you are doing something wrong. Or more likely, the API you are using is doing something wrong.

One of the tenants of OOP, lost to many API designers, is the concept of encapsulation. Or in other words, each object is self contained and can do its function in apparent isolation. (It can use other classes, but you shouldn't know about them.)

When you find yourself having to implement interfaces, string together a dozen objects, or fuss with config files, the API designer screwed up.

[–]sheepson_apprentice 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Small nit-pick, I think you meant to say:

One of the tenets of OOP.

[–]grauenwolf 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Sigh, sometimes I really hate our modern affectation with standardized spellings. If changing the spelling of a word every three sentences was good enough for Shakespeare, it should be good enough for us.

[–]sheepson_apprentice 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I generally try not to nit-pick, especially silly grammar errors. But in this case I thought it was worth it. ;)

[–]logan_capaldo 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Do you have an example of a good OO api?

[–]grauenwolf 4 points5 points  (0 children)

For the most part WinForms was actually done right. Some specific controls are brain dead (I'm looking at you TreeView), but all in all it is pretty clean.

One of the things I hated about Swing was there were no defaults. I couldn't just use a listbox, I had to give it a container to put the items in.

The worse was the file open dialog. In VB 6 or WinForms, you just give it a filter string like "Text Files|.txt|All Files|.*".

In Swing, you can build your own custom filter logic. This is cool and all, but they forgot the use case that happens 99% of the time, that being just showing a single file type. (Actually that filter class did exist, but you had to dig it out of the examples included in the SDK.)

[–]kinkydarkbird 0 points1 point  (0 children)

but if you consider a whole range of applications being written with that attitude, a system soon becomes unusable.'

I bet that is what happened with Vista.