An excellent, scholarly presentation by Kevlin Henney. Yes, it is a bit heavy on theory, and his focus is Java, but don’t get scared away. Kevlin delivers with wit and wisdom. Through the fun irony that his talk title suggests, he picks on our blind allegience to inheritance, our poor naming conventions, and our poor understanding of object identity.
If you’re serious about writing good, expressive, growable, and understandable
code in any language, you should absorb the information in this talk. You owe
it to your co-workers, your customers, and yourself in six months when you have
to revisit that monstorous class definition six subclasses removed from
NSObject that you wrote on a sleepless night while The Muppet Show was
playing on Netflix and you thought to yourself, “Gee, I need to reuse a lot of
this code somehow. I know! I’ll make another subclass!”1
(via Graham Lee)
Don’t ask.↩
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