Objects 101 - Uniformity

Some interesting comments to my last post have prompted my to expand more on what I believe is good OO.

For me getting to know good OO started out with being skeptical about Bad OO and saying "I don't get it". This is why I think I understand Joe. Healthy scepticism is a good thing, especially when something blatantly just doesn't add up. I could go into a rant about why programmers find it difficult to say "I don't know" or "I just don't get this" and blindly admire the “kings new cloths” even when the king is naked, but I'll leave that for another day :)

As an example of good OO let me reproduce the Smalltalk code example from my response to a comment by Paul Homer to my last post:

3 < 4 ifTrue:[ Transcript show: ‘3 is less than 4’].

Ok lets try and express this in a more familiar OO language, Java:

if ( 3 < 4) System.out.println(“3 is less than four”);

What is bad about this? Like Paul Homer pointed out the instructions (if, <, ..) clearly take precedence over the data (3, 4, ..) in true procedural style. Also there is only one object here "System.out", which given that it is a global static object is hardly an object at all. System.out.println() is no different then ( #include <system/io>) printf(). So the whole statement is not OO, it is procedural and would look pretty much the same written in C.

But Java is supposedly an OO language, so surely I can express this as objects. Lets try:

(new Integer(3)).isLessThan(new Integer(4)).isTrue(new Block {
void execute() {
System.out.println("3 is less than four");
}});

Ok. I've created a DSL here in Java to get rid of the primitives and procedures and express everything uniformly as objects. So what is so bad about this? Well it doesn't read half as well as the Smalltalk example. All those parenthesis and periods tend to obfuscate the intent. Secondly I would need to write my own Integer and Boolean classes, overwriting the ones in the Java standard library. Java's Integer doesn't understand the message 'isLessThan" and Java's Boolean object doesn't understand the message "isTrue". Also the use of an anonymous inner class to simulate a block seems rather verbose, but without closures what else can I do?

So writing pure OO code in Java is difficult to say the least. Does this matter? Well if you are trying to learn OO with an hybrid procedural/OO language, then I think it does. I for one (using C++) definitely found it a challenge.

What do you think?

Paul.

Why Bad OO Sucks

Anyone who as read my blog knows that I am an OO advocate, but I was watching Joe Armstrong the other day of Erlang fame and he posed the question: "In which Object should you place a given function? To me the choice seems arbitrary". Now if you've got a solid grounding in OO design principles then the answer to this one is easy. Keep the function near the data. So the object with most of the data is where the function should be. I have posed this very same question at interviews and most of the time supposed experienced OO Java developers are clueless.

The fact that a language designer is asking this question in itself is interesting, and says a lot about how OO has been misrepresented over the years. Joes critism is thoughtful. He outlines why he believes OO sucks in a blog post. He then asks the question, why did OO become so popular? I repeat each of his reasons here:

Why is (Bad) OO so popular?

• Reason 1 - It was thought to be easy to learn.
• Reason 2 - It was thought to make code reuse easier.
• Reason 3 - It was hyped.
• Reason 4 - It created a new software industry

I agree with all of Joes points.

Reason 1- Bad OO is easy to learn because it requires no learning at all. C with Classes is still C. And a class can be used the same as a struct if you choose. The whole ORM industry is built on using classes as structs :) So a bunch of programmers have transitioned from C to C++ to Java etc without learning almost anything at all.

Reason 2- Code reuse as always been speculation. The languages where object reuse has been achieved are not the popular ones. Take a look at NextStep. They managed to produce a pretty reuseable Financial Framework in the 1990s, but it was all written in Objective-C. The "industry" had decided at the time that C++ should be the OO language of choice and went off and tried to build "Pink", "CommonPoint", "OpenDoc" etc which all failed. Why? Could it be that C++ is a static language and the idea of "live" resuable Objects only works with a dynamic language? Even with dynamic languages reuse is illusive. Why? Well back to the idea of categorisation. No two things in this world are truly identical. So my Banks idea of a Bank Account is different to your Banks. So even with the binding problem solved by using a late bound dynamic language, it doesn't mean I can send my Account Object to your Bank and expect everything to work. Proper OO aficionados know this and for this reason alone do not seek to reuse objects out of context.

Reason 3 - Hyped. No arguments here :)

Reason 4 - OO didn't create an industry. The IT industry created an industry. In fact the father of OO Alan Kay has spent the last twenty years bemoaning what the IT industry has done with his baby. Reasons 3 and 4 go together. The industry hyped OO with promises of reuse etc and then felt obliged to go off and build middleware to deliver on the hype. The astute amongst us noticed pretty early on that hey this stuff is getting pretty complex and heavyweight. The rest merrily jumped on the bandwagon with COM, CORBA, J2EE etc. So as Joe rightly points out the industry created a problem of its own making then went about selling us stuff to solve it.

At this point I should go on to defend good OO. But Joe wasn't speaking about good OO. Good OO doesn't suffer from all these problems and good OO isn't popular. Infact good OO is still in obscurity and suffering from funding problems, something that cannot be said for Bad OO.

No, I have plenty of other posts on this blog that speak to the qualities of good OO. And I am not going to say that good OO is intrinsically better or worst then good FP. I would just say that they are different approaches to modeling, each with its own sweet spot. And as always the thing that really matters is the fleshy blob behind the keyboard :)

Small is Beautiful

Computers are getting faster and more powerful all the time, yet whilst the average mobile phone as more processing power then all the computers NASA used to put man on the moon combined (well I'm not sure whether this is true, but if it is it wouldn't surprise me:)), our software of today is still no better then Doug Englebarts in the 1950's.

So why are us programmers having such an hard time keeping up with the hardware? The root of the problem is complexity. Whilst hardware has got much faster, it still performs a small number of very simple things like ' load', 'add', 'subtract', 'accumulate', 'shift', 'store', etc. It is the sequence in which these simple things are performed and the speed at which they are executed that gives the illusion of the computer being clever. In actual fact the computer isn't clever at all, the clever part is arranging these simple instructions into a useful sequence, and this is where programmers come in.

So programmers are the clever ones. Yes, but our cleverness is finite. Evolution works at a very slow pace and cannot be expected to keep up with Moores law :) So how can we expect to utilise ever more powerful computers if our brains just can't keep up? Well the starting point is realising that people are indeed the weakest link. Our cognitive abilities are finite and we need to organise our programming activities in such a way to best exploit our inherent strengths and respect our limits as human beings. This leads naturally to the subject of programming language design, but I'm not going to go there today.

No what I want to speak about is chunking and the magical number 7 plus or minus two. The way the theory goes is that us as human-beings can hold around 7 +/- 2 things in our brains at one time. Once the number of parts in a system become larger then this, then we are well advised to abstract and create hierarchies of things, ensuring that the 7 +/- 2 cognitive limit at any given level in our hierarchy is observed.

Anyway, back to software, 7 +/- 2 doesn't only apply to the organisation of computer programs, it also applies to teams. Small software teams tend to be able to adapt to changing requirements in away that large teams just can't. As a strong believer in Agile development and Emergent Design, this ability to turn on a sixpence is invaluable to me, and I tend to avoid large teams.

Experience has proven to me, that when it comes to software development that small is beautiful. After proclaiming this for many a year I have finally stumbled on the original paper that explains the theoretical underpinnings of this point of view:

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
by George A. Miller.

Enjoy.

Shu-Ha-Ri (Knowledge, Understanding and Skill)

InfoQ has picked up on a couple of blog post by Jim Shore recently. One where he speculates that Kanban and Lean approaches are viable alternatives to methodologies like Scrum and XP. Another where he says that Agile is in decline.

All the terms in italics in the above paragraph are just labels. Labels are just a convenient way to categories things. What we all would do well to remember is that in the words of Hayakawa: "the label is not the thing". Just because something is labeled Agile doesn't mean that it is an actual instance of the thing the original advocates had in mind. The Japanese understand this, and have developed a method of learning where they recognise different levels of mastery over the thing that is being taught. Shu-Ha-Ri, or roughly translated: Knowledge, Understanding and Skill. Just because some one knows the label it doesn't mean that they understand the thing. And just because they understand a specific instance of the thing, it doesn't mean that they have the skill to improvise and create a new instance of the same thing in a new context.

Categorising things and applying labels to them is a practice that is full of pitfalls. I will be posting more on this subject in the near future.

America is not Voting

I came across this on the BBC. Now why on earth in the richest country on the planet are people queuing for hours just to exercise their right to vote? I am living in the US right now and watching the election as an outside spectator is very interesting.

Traditionally around a third of Americans bother to vote. In fact one of the biggest grass roots issues over here has been voter registration. So why the apathy? This time around voter turn out is expected to reach record levels. So it looks like the silent majority have finally found their voice.

Central to the idea of democracy is the responsible citizen making an informed choice. In the UK we take our voting responsibility very seriously indeed. Which is as it should be given that people have died defending our right to vote. The whole ethos of our (free) education system and our public service cultural institutions like the BBC is geared to producing well rounded and well informed citizens able to utilise their vote intelligently. Over the years this has led to consensus politics, where there is broad cross party agreement on a number of major issues. When you have vice presidential candidates who can't tell you which newspapers they read, doesn't that say something about the strength of your democracy? If the politicians aren't informed, what are the chances of the electorate being informed? Isn't this the root cause of the polarisation that is so self evident in US politics today? The informed versus the uninformed rather than left versus right?

I picked up this quote from a documentary I once saw on the plight of the American Indian. An old Indian chief on a reservation was asked what he thought of the white man:

"The white man has many great things, but he cares not whether his people are wise".

Apt words, which still have relevance today. Living here now, I can say that Americans are wonderful people and worthy of the claim to be the greatest nation on earth. With any luck they will make the right choices and begin to address the weaknesses in their democracy and become even greater still.

The defining moment in the election so far for me was Colin Powells contribution. Colin Powells America is a country I would be proud to be a citizen of.