OOP: You're Doing It Completely Wrong

OOP: You're Doing It Completely Wrong (Stir Trek Edition)

This talk, "OOP: You're Doing It Completely Wrong", was first presented at CodeMash 2.0.1.4. in January to a standing room only crowd.  It was the 2nd time I was fortunate enough to present at CodeMash and it was an absolute blast!  The feedback I got was really encouraging and someone suggested I should submit it to other conferences and recommended Stir Trek.  The video above is the recording of the talk as it was given at Stir Trek 2014 in April (to another standing room only crowd!).

Here's the abstract:

Chances are, most of us are primarily writing in Object Oriented Languages. But how many of us are truly doing Object Oriented Programming (OOP)? Objects are a powerful abstraction, but when all we do is write procedural code wrapped in classes we’re not realizing their benefits. That’s the tricky thing about OO, it’s easy to have Objects but still not be doing good OOP. This has led to a plethora of principles and patterns and laws, which are very valuable, but also easy to misunderstand and misapply. In this talk we’ll go back to the foundations of Objects, and take a careful look at what OO is really about and how our principles and patterns fit into the big picture. We’ll see why good OOP is important, and look at the mindset needed to design successful Objects. When we’re done, we’ll have a more nuanced understanding of what good OO is, what it can do for us, and when we should use it.

Between CodeMash and Stir Trek I had the time to really work through and reorganize the details of the talk, so I actually COMPLETELY rewrote it from the ground up for Stir Trek.  And I will admit that I'm really proud of the result.

This talk truly represents my (current) understanding of what makes OO powerful and how we should really think about it.  It's VERY heavy on research and full of quotes and references.  The CodeMash version was even more so.  And that reflects my belief that we, as an industry, need to work on being a bit more scientific, especially when it comes to citing our references.

I hope that you enjoy it, and I'd love to hear your thoughts!