Object orienting design has its place, but it is not the panacea that its "true believers" claim. Just look at how it is taught. Examples are absurd in many cases. They use absurd things like animals. Okay, we have a class called animal. So, let's create a member of that class. We will call it a dog. Now, what does a dog need? Oh, a bark! And a tail! And on it goes. And this relates to actual programming, how? For some things, like graphics, OOP is quite useful. For other things, it is a waste.But many have drank the OOP Kool Aid. The worst are the ones like one troll I encountered who claimed that Ayn Rand had invented, or at least inspired, object oriented programming.

Most of the first settler of the "New World" died there. I doubt many said, "Oh dear, I am feeling poorly. I shall board the next ship so I can return and die in England (or wherever they were from.) Such is the nature of colonization.

But this is not one. It is an absurd idea. This is a virus, like many others, that developed in an animal species, and quickly spread to a human population, and has gone worldwide. The possibility has been predicted for a very long time, and while this one is extreme, others have been as bad, or worse.

First off, the way OOP is taught exposes it flaws. It is always introduced by using examples like âoeanimalsâ or âoevehicles. You are walked through adding things like âoespecies,ââoenumber of legs,â âoesound,â until you have designed a dog, and a cat, and a fish. Or you create cars by specifying âoenumber of doors,â âoecolor,â and so on. Funny...Iâ(TM)ve never been asked to create an animal on the computer. Or a car. Now, I can see where OOP has value for some projects. A GUI, or a graphics program, where you are actually working with things that are logically expressed as objects, but it becomes a mess for other purposes. You find yourself constrained to express things as âoeobjectsâ that are more easily, and naturally expressed in other ways. You spend way more time trying to follow rules than creating an efficient program. This sort of thing has been around for a long time. Years ago, when Pascal was common, there was a rigid rule that you never, ever, use a goto. Now, this made sense in many situations. Having your code hopping about all willy-nilly, could cause horrible problems. On the other hand, in a program I was working on, I encountered a situation where using a goto was the simplest, logical answer. More modern programming languages would not need it, but as I tried to avoid it, I realized that it would require not only a massive re-write, but would also result in far more convoluted logic, and much more code. This was in the days of single sided floppies, and relatively small amount of memory. A 10 meg hard drive was very expensive, and most programs ran off one floppy disk, and if you were lucky, you had a second for data. Otherwise, you did a lot of swapping. Having to follow rules that are carved in stone is not conducive to good programming. I had a co-worker who refused to accept that a single goto that worked, and save time, money, and a great deal of my sanity was preferable to blindly following some imagined divine edict that he seemed to think was necessary for the universe to self-destruct.

And donâ(TM)t forget the novel âoeThe Andromeda Strain,â which dealt with a fictional disease brought back by a satellite. It came out in 1969, and could not have inspired NASAâ(TM)s caution, but it did fuel fears about the possibility of âoegerms from space.â NASAâ(TM)s view was, âoeBetter safe than sorry.â I think it was a wise choice.

I was very interested in the space program. The original protocol was to have the capsule airlifted, unopened, to the air craft carrier Hornet. A plastic tunnel would be sealed to the capsule, leading to the Mobile Quarantine Facility that they would travel in to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Houston. But that was changed to them wearing special suits, that they donned in the capsule, and walking from the helicopter that brought them to the Hornet along a marked path. One of the astronauts actually stepped a bit outside the path. After they were in the trailer, the path was mopped with bleach. I found the change in the plan a bit disconcerting, but it proved unnecessary after three missions without a problem. I have visited the Hornet, and saw one of the four trailers that was built (the one from Apollo 11 is at the Smithsonian. It is an incredible experience. Not just for the lunar mission connection, but to see such a magnificent ship. I have also visited the Pampanito, a WW II submarine, and was struck by the contrast of the enormous amount of room on a carrier, and the claustrophobic nature of the submarine.

My first PC was a UNIVAC 1110 running EXEC 8. I wrote my first program in FORTRAN using punch cards. I quickly discover BASIC and that is how I learned program. This was right before the Altair came out. I eventually bought a TI 99/4a, and expanded my knowledge. I BSed my way into my first programming job, and learned Pascal in two days, and mastered it in two weeks. I moved to an Atari, and that opened up a lot more languages. I bought my first MSDOS machine, and eventually moved up to a very nice system when I inherited some money. I also collected a lot of older machines that I played with. Now, many years later, I have switched to Apple, and I have a laptop, an iPhone, and an iPad that a orders of magnitude more powerful than that mainframe. In fact, my iPhone is many times faster than a Cray X-MP. I also have a cheap Android that I use as a test bed for programming apps. I do most of my work in Swift, though I have FORTRAN, Pascal, and yes, even BASIC around for nostalgia. I also can run an emulator if I want to relive the days of my TI and my Atari. It is very easy to find, and install pretty much any programming language. I even have INTERCAL.

Uh, no. It is May, and it probably wonâ(TM)t rain here in San Francisco until September or October.

I have been a fan of this show, along with some other very intelligent friends, from the first. Yes, it can be a bit silly at times, but I have known people like the characters. I grew up as the neighborhood geek girl. I had the chemistry sets, a microscope, a weather station, and I wanted to build a lab in the back yard where I could do serious experiments. One summer was spent exhuming what I thought, at first, was the skeleton of a small dinosaur. It turned out to be the skeleton of a dog. Later, I would take apart radios, and such, and wire things up to see if I could get them to work. One of the neighborhood's less bright boys asked me what science was good for. I proceeded to point out everything that he had that was made through science. He never asked a dumb question like that again. Now, I am older, but I still keep up with a lot of things, like physics, programming, and such. This show has been very entertaining, and I am rather bemused by those who have decided to hate on it, mainly because someone has told them they should.