I’ve been thinking a lot about change lately. Things finally resonated to me after listening to Uncle Bob Martin on No Capes. He made an amazingly interesting point about change and different methods for minimizing the risk over time of change.

I want to share some of what I’ve been thinking about along those lines. What follows is a collection of some of my evolving thoughts relating to change and complexity. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

This is the fourth post in my “Beyond” series. The previous three posts focused on re-imagining OOP and questioning some of the core beliefs that we have come to take for granted. This one is going to be slightly different, in that I want to talk about another angle of writing code: the process itself. We always talk about how code should be clean, but how do you write clean code?

In the last post Beyond Inheritance, we talked about looking past “types” and reasoning about objects differently. The conclusion was that inheritance wasn’t necessary for OOP, and often results in more problems than it solves. Well, let’s go beyond that and explore more of what will come from treating objects as containers of behavior. Let’s look at what this means for various kinds of classes:

In my last post, I talked about revisiting the concept of Design Patterns and questioned how useful it is to “learn” them. The conclusion that I came to was that you are better served by focusing on how objects communicate rather than traditional patterns. Well, that’s not the only “traditional concept” that I think we should move beyond. So, let’s talk about inheritance…

Many people teach design patterns as a fundamental step to Object Oriented Programming. They are so universally seen as important that almost every single conference that I have been to has had at least one talk about them. They are quite often used as interview questions to test a candidate’s OOP knowledge. However, just like inheritance, they are not needed for OOP. And just like inheritance, they are a distraction rather than a foundation. Instead of focusing on patterns, I suggest focusing on learning about abstraction and communication. Why? Let’s talk it out…