Talk:Dependency injection/Archives/2010/January

Jargon in lede

I find the lede of this article to be vague and esoteric to the point of being meaningless. It is composed almost entirely of words that can have a dozen different meanings in different contexts, such as "dependency", "external interface", and "software component".

Fowler's own article has a much clearer single-sentence description of the topic:

The basic idea of the Dependency Injection is to have a separate object, an assembler, that populates a field in the lister class with an appropriate implementation for the finder interface, resulting in a dependency diagram along the lines of Figure 2.

To me, this description (aside from the overly specific example classes "lister" and "finder") is a much clearer one-sentence introduction for those uninitiated in the latest and greatest in software engineering pontification. Can we base our lede on this instead? --Doradus (talk) 02:20, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

So you don't think that "object", "assembler", "field" and "lister class" are jargon? The purpose of the first sentence is not to provide a precise definition (which can be done later) but introducing a feeling of the subject ("an accessible overview") to the general reader - that including people without knowledge of OOP.

I have no problem with the words being vague (disclaimer: I wrote the current version of the lead paragraph), among other reasons because it allows for *different * implementations of DI other than the one described by Fowler (which is not necessarily the only one) - but mainly because "dependency" and "software component" are quite self-explaining even for non programmers.

If you find Fowler's definition clearer, you can add it later in the lead section for the benefit of readers who already know OOP. Diego (talk) 09:52, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Good points indeed. Now I'm not sure what to do. I still find our lede puzzling but I'm not sure how to improve it. --Doradus (talk) 17:38, 22 January 2010 (UTC)