Object Thinking Quotes

“Software development is neither a scientific nor an engineering task. It is an act of reality construction that is political and artistic.”
― David West, Object Thinking

“It’s never appropriate to tell yourself, “This is what the code will look like, so I need an object to hold these parts of the code, and another to hold these parts, and another to make sure these two do what they are told to do when they are told to do it,” which is precisely what structured development tempts you to do.”
― David West, Object Thinking

“avoid old ways of thinking by avoiding the metaphors that are associated with those kinds of thinking. “Instead of ’next the machine needs to do this,’ we use, ’Just ask object X to do that.”
― David West, Object Thinking

“Countering the juggernaut of formalism is a minority worldview of equal historical standing, even though it does not share equal awareness or popularity. Variously known as hermeneutics, constructivism, interpretationalism, and most recently postmodernism, this tradition has consistently challenged almost everything advanced by the formalists. Iterative development practices, including XP, and object thinking are consistent with the hermeneutic worldview. Unfortunately, most object, XP, and agile practitioners are unaware of this tradition and its potential for providing philosophical support and justification for their approach to software development.”
― David West, Object Thinking

“The justification for the XP approach is based on two simple empirical observations: “We have seen master developers do these things” and “We have seen less proficient developers do these things and become better.”
― David West, Object Thinking

“it was noted that one aspect of a class was to act as a repository for code and information shared by all instances (objects) of that class. In terms of efficiency, this is a good idea because storage space is minimized and changes can be made in a single place. It becomes very tempting, however, to use this fact to justify creating your class hierarchy based on shared code instead of shared behaviors. A similar error arises from treating object variables (instance variables) as if they were data attributes and then creating your hierarchy based on shared attributes. Always create hierarchies based on shared behaviors, side”
― David West, Object Thinking

“Managers; academics; software engineers; computer scientists; and proponents of UML, RUP, and CMM all tend to be formalists. Practitioners, as Robert Glass has shown, generally are informalists. XP and object thinkers aspire to be aformalists.”
― David West, Object Thinking

“We have come to the end of our vocabulary list and have not included one of the most mentioned terms in object literature—reuse. There are several reasons for this. First, reuse is not a goal of object thinking; composability is. Composable objects will be reused as a matter of course, so reuse is but a byproduct of a more general goal. Second, there are ways to obtain reuse that are not related to object thinking—code libraries, for example—and the distraction is not really helpful. Lastly, reuse was once touted as the premier benefit of object orientation—a claim that proved to be highly overstated. Worse, perhaps, was the claim that maximum reuse could best be obtained via inheritance. Object thinking claims to lead to the discovery and crafting of composable objects. The goal is to create a mindset that leads to evolving flexible applications and systems that directly reflect and support an application domain. Reuse will emerge, but it is not a driving force.”
― David West, Object Thinking

“Insanity is doing the same thing that failed last time and expecting it to work this time.” Management,”
― David West, Object Thinking

“GoF patterns might better be called implementation patterns than design (or thinking) patterns. Other”
― David West, Object Thinking

“Object thinking focuses our attention on the problem space rather than the solution space. Object”
― David West, Object Thinking

“If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” Following”
― David West, Object Thinking

“method for”
― David West, Object Thinking

“People write programs without any expectation that they will be right the first time. They spend at least as much time testing and correcting errors as they spent writing the initial program. ... Software is released for use, not when it is known to be correct, but when the rate of discovering errors slows down to one that management considers acceptable.”
― David West, Object Thinking

“Effective use of metaphor requires constant awareness that a metaphor is not a specification.”
― David West, Object Thinking

“Thinking like an object will lead to a greater degree of isomorphism between objects found in the problem space (the enterprise domain) and those employed in a solution space (the computer program) than thinking like a computer. Isomorphism of the modules (objects) in problem and solution space is a desirable, in fact essential, quality for software.”
― David West, Object Thinking

“The process of learning a culture—enculturation—is partly explicit but mostly implicit. The explicit part can be put into books and taught in seminars or classrooms. Most of culture is acquired by a process of absorption—by living and practicing the culture with those who already share it. No book, including this one, can replace the need to live a culture. But it is possible to use a book as a means of “sensitizing,” of preparing, a person for enculturation—shortening the time required to understand and begin integrating lived experiences.”
― David West, Object Thinking