gateman9's Journal: It's just a damn paradigm!

Okay, let me preface this by saying that I am language agnostic, as few of my fellows seem to be anymore. I know this was the reason they used Scheme at my university for the first programming language, and why 90% of the CS classes are about theory, not languages as units (as opposed to language theory, which is another whole ball of wax).

I guess I missed out on Wednesday when I was catching up on some sleep. Seriously people, do you actively work with the development team of the language? Are you in charge of design decisions? Does Zend personally ask you for language direction? Or more abstractly, has Linus ever called you up and asked what you wanted to do with the kernel?

I thought not.

Anyway, just because a language supports the OO paradigm does not mean you have to use it. I've seen hundreds of programs that force OO-designed languages into the old procedural model. Hell, as embarrased as I am to admit it, my own father does it all the time when working with J2EE. His Java code comes out looking like his COBOL.

Seriously though, if you don't like the effing paradigm, don't use it. Honestly, the whole idea behind OO was to make good modularity easy to acheive. And PHP5 does a reasonably good job at it (better than the misbegotten C++). Those over-reacting should be ecstatic at the opportunity to potentially make their PHP code even better.

It seems like fewer and fewer people are coming out of school with the tools necessary to learn a new language. And to me this sounds like people being frightened because their precious "training" is going to go down the tubes. Their fault for being inflexible. For cripse sake, I learned FORTRAN-70 in about two weeks (needed to check the other side of some fun SQL-code interlocking with som fluid dynamics code); I learned Smalltalk in about a week; I picked up C# and Slate in the same 3 week span. And don't think I'm not proficient in any of them: one of the things I got out of all my CS classes is how to transcend languages and paradigms and be proficient in all combinations.

Relax, folks, and take the change. If it scares you that much ... uh, well, you better leave Perl alone (it's doing OO now) ... uh, well get used to OO programming, it's a useful paradigm and a lot of people are picking it up, otherwise, quit now and find something else to do.

I've had it with these people, their fear of change, and their mucking about in programming languages where in general their opinion isn't worth noting.