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Getting the knack of OO coding


By Andrew Binstock
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May 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)

One of the areas in which I most see poor coding style is in OO code written by developers, such as I, who were weaned on procedural code. Only by dint of many hundreds of rounds of refactoring has my Java code begun to look like native OO code and not an OO veneer over procedural code. I still have further to go to write those small, crisp methods as a natural expression of my thinking, but I am finally getting there.

This progress was realized by hard effort—an effort, I would add, that took far longer than I expected. The time and struggle would have been greatly reduced had I earlier read an essay in a new book from the Pragmatic Programmers called “The ThoughtWorks Anthology.” The essay I am referring to is “Object Calisthenics” by Jeff Bay. It’s a detailed exercise for perfecting the creation of small routines that demonstrate true OO design. If you have developers who need to improve their ability to write OO routines, I suggest you get this essay. I will summarize Bay’s approach here.

He suggests writing a 1,000-line program with the following constraints listed below. These constraints are intended to be excessively restrictive so as to force developers out of the procedural groove. I guarantee if you apply this technique, your code will move markedly towards object orientation. The restrictions (which should be mercilessly enforced in this exercise) are:

1.    Use only one level of indentation per method. If you need more than one level, you need to create a second method and call it from the first. This is one of the most important constraints in the exercise.

2.    Don’t use the “else” keyword. Test for a condition with an if-statement and exit the routine if it’s not met. This prevents if-else chaining and every routine does just one thing. You’re getting the idea.

3.    Wrap all primitives and strings. This directly addresses “primitive obsession.” If you want to use an integer, you first have to create a class (even an inner class) to identify its true role. So zip codes are an object, not an integer, for example. This makes for far clearer and more testable code.



Related Search Term(s): Programming

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