RE: RE: [PHP] the state of the PHP community

From: Per Jessen

> Bob McConnell wrote:
> 
>> In chronological order -
>> 
>> Languages: [snip]  C++ (Still don't
>> understand the purpose of objects or classes).
> 
> Two words - encapsulation and abstraction.

Both of which are euphemisms that simply mean obfuscation. I learned
very early in my professional career to eschew obfuscation, so they
don't impress me at all. In addition, I really don't do abstraction
well. I have trouble when I have to deal with more than two levels of
indirection. Having written and debugged a _lot_ of real-time
applications and device drivers, in both assembler and C, I am much more
comfortable with the concrete, like managing I/O registers, interrupt
controllers and circular buffers. Unfortunately, there aren't many of
those jobs left. That's one of the primary reasons I am looking forward
to retiring.

I still believe that OOP is as much of a fad as Structured Programming
and Top-Down Programming were. They all can be used to solve certain
classes of problems, but none of them are a silver bullet for software
development. OOP will eventually learn its place in the overall scheme
of programming, but it will never be universally applicable.

Bob McConnell