Ways in which learning can be A Bad Thing™

date:2006-08-31 17:54:30 category:Building Skills

Once I learned C++, all my C programming became poor-man’s OO.

• Every “class” became a C structure type.
• Every class structure was implemented as a header file that defined the structure and a bunch of method functions.
• Each method function would have a “self” argument, which was a pointer to the object’s type definition.

This code was somewhat wordy and contrived-looking when compared with more typical C programs. But there was no going back to ordinary procedural programming after learning OO programming.

Similarly, once I learned how to do solid OO analysis, that was the end of any other style of requirements discovery and documentation. Even if the project was explicitly never going to have an OO implementation, I still had to do OO analysis, no matter what. It leads to documents that are shorter and more to the point (when compared with other analysis documents), but people would still be confused by the business focus and lack of techno-mumbo-jumbo.

I’m forced to do all design work in the following contrived way:

1. Create the Python class definitions
2. Get the key algorithms to work in Python
3. Write a specification for VB or Java programmers, based on the Python. Or, if I’m doing the implementation, I rewrite the Python into Java.

All are down sides of learning better ways to work.