Talk:Object-Oriented Software Construction

criticism of the book

See http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/meyer1.htm for a criticism of the book. The citation police keep removing it. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.120.226.1 (talk • contribs).

Reply to: Criticism of the Book

While I would normally not want to suppress any counter views, firstly that link is no longer there. Having found the article, I can see it is a very contrived criticism.

The author seems to be unnamed.

S/he claims at the beginning "In other-words, OO is not a general-purpose software organizational paradigm, and "selling" it as such harms progress in the alternatives."

This is a very wrong premise. OO most certainly is a general-purpose paradigm. The rest of the criticism is along similar lines of making wrong assertions. Here are some.

Two foundations is the author seems anti-OO, not just the book. Perhaps this book being the canonical and most authoritative on the subject, it is a natural target. The author is also a proponent of relational databases vs OODMBS. In this, I agree, the OODBMS people posed OODB as the next model past RDB. That was wrong. But that has little to do with OO or OOSC.

Reading further the author would quote from OOSC, but then put a different slant on it or extend it beyond what it said. That is straw man argument.

His criticism of Design by Contract shows very little understanding.

The last part is again about OODB vs OO. They are just not the same thing, and thinking they are ends up in pointless religious wars.

C.J Date and Hugh Darwen have written a book on how the two go together 'Foundations for Object/Relational Databases' to mainly counter the bogus hype the OODB people put around. But again that has little to do with OOSC.

Thus I think the link is not worth including to waste people's time on many spurious arguments from someone who has other axes to grind. Ian.joyner (talk) 09:53, 14 October 2024 (UTC)