I did write about twelve books and I still consider OP's point to be very valid. The blog entry is great in that it shows how collaborating over the Internet can lead to improvement but it's indeed a bit concerning that someone who didn't know what polymorphism was had been publishing a programming book.
Clay wrote a book about RubyMotion (a Ruby compiler for iOS), not a book that teaches OOP. His knowledge about polymorphism is not so relevant for this book (I think he "knows" what polymorphism is but he was genuinely amazed by the way you can use it for this particular case).
I'm not a developer, but I read this article anyway. All of this blew me away. Like this "@mordaroso" fellow strolled on up, cocked his knee skyward, and jettisoned his leg into the rickety wooden door that previously sheltered my mind. That was just great writing.
I disagree. I had to parse the sentence three times to make all the pieces fit. :\
I don't believe that its terribly antiquated. Pretty much everything bases itself off of this book. Edit: drafted iPad - fixed spelling. Trilby - does anyone even use that word anymore?!?
"I don't believe that it's the trilby antiquated. Pretty much everything bases itself off of this book." Hardly. The GoF book is sweet if in this day and age you're still doing Java/C# but if you're programming in a language like, say, Clojure you can throw about 75% of the GoF book into the trash. pg said to use a Lisp to beat the average and that's what I'm doing. I'm certainly not accepting the status-quo and cons…
Design patterns are, admittedly, workarounds for language deficiencies, but the book is still recent because far more people program in Java and C# than Clojure.
While true, when I purchase a book I'm trusting that the author is an expert in the topic. Maybe my expectations are too high.
You may never know - if it teaches you some things and makes you more productive, then what of it?
My concern is the inverse of that: recommending something you either don't fully understand or haven't used long enough to speak to either its pros or cons. Being in a book usually is an indicator that something is a best practice or how the way things should be done, ostensibly being put forth by an expert. Perhaps we shouldn't hold such content to such a standard.
+1 for Good programming is not an objective concept.
== Programming sucks nowadays. There is not even a consensus on what is good in programming! Take a look at other professional cultures: people work extremely hard to develop the skills that everybody else in their profession have. What does a software developer do? Whatever they like on their own, there is no professional culture whatsoever: "Don't give a crap about the humankind's experience, I'll invent everything…
If you can't draw upon your past mistakes, or techniques that have failed for you before, you shouldn't be mentoring.
Put more positively, use your experience to guide others.
I don't love this refactor. I especially don't like how it generates names from other names -- e.g., given 'switch'/'submit', appends '_row', and then converts it to CamelCase so you get 'SwitchRow'/'SubmitRow', then instantiates the class named that. Here's why: When I am maintaining somebody else's code, even if I guess that this is going on, I rarely trust these kinds of name-generation tricks. When I need to chan…
...I rarely trust these kinds of name-generation tricks. So you're probably not a big fan of Rails, then?
what about using a multiline YAML text to be loaded with automatic generation of objects from class name strings? (reminder!)
I do something a little bit similar with DOM interaction in JS, for example button ".btn_pdf_docs" shows all ".pdf_docs" elements. I consider the code to implement this more readable than a bunch of events binding.
Thats a very critical point that you just have to understand, to "get". Many people know and learn about object oriented design, but when tasked to actually write a program based on these principles they will often revert to code where they make distinctions based on the type of what they have been handed. TLDR: dynamic_cast is bad design
I guess he's gonna come back with another article when he realizes composition > inheritance.
You'll need to wait like 5 years if he was anything like me
+1 for Good programming is not an objective concept.
== Programming sucks nowadays. There is not even a consensus on what is good in programming! Take a look at other professional cultures: people work extremely hard to develop the skills that everybody else in their profession have. What does a software developer do? Whatever they like on their own, there is no professional culture whatsoever: "Don't give a crap about the humankind's experience, I'll invent everything…
It's not that there's no professional culture in programming, it's that programming has a problem/solution space orders of magnitude larger than any other profession that has ever existed. If we could agree on some constraints of what software does and what the priorities are then we could develop more concrete professional standards, but that's not how it works. Software is the stuff of pure thought; it is layer upon layer of abstraction that towers up to henceforth unknown data processing tasks. As messy as it is, we can only strive to further the state of the art as it applies to the task at hand. There's no way to definitively pit NASA's process against Facebook's against a random perl data cruncher. None of this means programming doesn't have a professional culture, just that it will take a while longer to distill the strongest knowledge and it will necessarily be a broader than the other professional standards.