Phillip Trelford's Array

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7. October 2014 C#, C++, Java Comment (6)

Are you working in the enterprise?

Do you find yourself, day-in-day-out, up to the eyeballs in unmaintainable code?

Does the once beautiful architecture now more closely resemble a big ball of mud, that no amount of tooling will dig you out of?

What can you do?

1) Bury your head in the sand

A very popular option, you just need to keep practising denial.

2) Turn to drink

Another popular option, although unfortunately this strategy is only likely to last as long as your liver.

3) Become a scrum master

This is an easy way out, scrum certification is just a 2 day course away, but there’s probably no looking back.

4) Admit there’s a problem

This is one of the hardest and least popular options, but possibly the most rewarding.

Start by saying out loud: “Object Oriented Programming is an expensive disaster which must end” and then take each new day as it comes.

Phil
10/8/2014 12:09:38 AM |

Paulo, I wholeheartedly agree with you on heading towards simpler solutions and being prepared for more radical changes.
I've found focusing more on modular programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_programming through separating concerns and minimizing dependencies makes changing functionality over time a lot easier. However, although this is achievable in mainstream OO P languages, I feel the combination of deadlines in enterprise combined with the ease at which cyclic dependencies can be introduced means that this is more often the exception rather than the rule.

Pasho
10/8/2014 2:36:20 AM |

Modularity - that's exactly what we do. The best thing - I can start building each new module with new ideas and lessons learned. I'm not too fuss about OOP or any other approach. My C# code consists of lambdas and extensions a little less than completely. I'd probably go F#, but some things I want require the latest versions of everything, which is another massive problem in big companies, partly caused by the legacy zoo of all those marvellous enterprise architecture creatures.

Paul Gehrman
10/9/2014 8:37:11 AM |

Sadly, OOP is a religion and, like most religions, is hard to get rid of. The good news is that a fairly high percentage of experienced developers realize that OOP has substantial failings and is philosophically flawed. The bigger problem is new developers coming out of school who are still drunk from the OOP Kool-Aid.

Dev
10/10/2014 2:05:35 AM |

Oh, so using e.g. F# is not an option? Because it's an OOP language just as much as e.g. C# is a functional language. Does it leave us with Haskell? I'd like to see that - thousands of developers all over the world spending most of their time arguing about merits of some homomorphic applicative endo-functors.

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