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The Price of Purity


By Allen Holub
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February 1, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 3)
I don’t believe that it’s reasonable to use Java as a procedural language solely to leverage its rich set of libraries. If you’re going to use Java, embrace the object-oriented paradigm. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with me.

Most people who build “pure” OO systems notice an interesting paradox: Pure OO systems are simultaneously more complex to build and easier to maintain than hybrid procedural/OO systems. The complexity is just inherent in the language and the mechanisms of object orientation (like inheritance). The “pure” system is better organized than the hybrid, however, and that is reflected in easier maintenance. Hybrids tend to have all the complexity inherent in OO without any of its maintainability.

I guess my belief makes me a purist, but I think of it as pragmatism. I just got sick of rewriting hybrid systems once they hit maintenance (which happens five seconds after you write the first line of code). My experience notwithstanding, I often hear the word “pure” spoken with a sneer, as if it’s a bad thing. I’ve been told that in the real world, nobody has the luxury of “academic purity,” whatever that is. In reality, I don’t have the luxury of wasting time building, debugging or maintaining procedural systems written in Java. The pure systems go together faster, have fewer bugs, and are vastly easier to maintain.

Nonetheless, most Java shops don’t do anything like pure OO. In fact, many Java programmers don’t understand even the basic principles of OO design and programming. Moreover, many off-the-shelf tools encourage a procedural approach (Apache’s Struts open-source framework comes to mind). If you’re working this way, you won’t get most of the real benefits of OO, however.

Managers—even those who understand the benefits of OO—circle around the methodology like sharks who are wary of their prey. They want the advantages of an OO system but don’t know how to get them. For example, they pay for training but are unwilling to actually implement the things that their programmers learn.




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