Most of my college coursework was around OOP. That said, they actually did a pretty lousy job of explaining it in a practical sense, so since we were left to figure it out ourselves a lot of our assignments ended up looking like this.

At the end of the program, our capstone project was to build a full stack app. They did a pretty good job simulating a real professional experience: we all worked together on requirements gathering and database design, then were expected to build our own app.

To really drive home the real world experience, the professor would change the requirements partway through the project. Which is a total dick move, but actually a good lesson on its own.

Anyway, this app was mostly about rendering a bunch of different views, and something subtly would change that ended up affecting all views. After the fact, the professor would say something to the effect of "If you used good objects, you'll only have to make the change in one place."

This of course is only helpful if you really appreciated the power of OOP and planned it from the start. Most of us were flying by the seat of our pants, so it was usually a ton of work to get those changes in

[–] Kache@lemm.ee 21 points 3 days ago (2 children)

If you used good objects, you'll only have to make the change in one place

IMO that's generally a retroactive statement because in practice have to be lucky for that to be true. An abstraction along one dimension -- even a good one, will limit flexibility in some other dimension.

Occasionally, everything comes into alignment and an opportunity appears to reliably-ish predict the correct abstraction the future will need.

Most every other time, you're better off avoiding the possibility of the really costly bad abstraction by resisting the urge to abstract preemptively.

[–] shasta@lemm.ee 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Generally true, but if the professor in this context was not a moron, he probably mentioned at the start of the class that he would be forcing a change to requirements part way through the course. Ideally, he would've specified what kind of changes this would be, in order for the students to account for that in their design. I think it's likely this happened, but the student was lacking so much experience he didn't understand that hint or what he needed to do in the design in order to later swap parameters more easily. I'm going to withhold judgement on this professor having only heard a biased account. It could've been a very good assignment, now being told from the perspective of a mediocre student.

[–] Bougie_Birdie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I wasn't aware my mediocrity was on display. 😅

Honestly, I liked the professor. When he had time to teach something he was clearly interested in, he did a great job of connecting. He didn't get to teach us OOP though because there was a staffing emergency. The person we did get normally taught Hardware, so he was basically just reading aloud the textbook. Poor guy.

And you're right, the professor did let us know that there was going to be a change of requirements partway through. But it wouldn't be a good lesson if he told us what was going to change, although he did give some examples from previous times he'd taught the course.

A lot of people got burned when the change came. For my part I thought I did pretty okay, the refactor didn't go perfectly but it was better than if I hadn't been prepared. But I've also written a bunch of really gross objects that served no purpose just because they might change later. As anything is, it's all about finding that happy medium

[–] Bougie_Birdie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 days ago

That's a fair assessment. It's kind of like the rule for premature optimization: don't.

With experience you might get some intuition about when it's good to lean into inheritance. We were definitely lacking experience at that point though.

OOP is a pretty powerful paradigm, which means it's also easy to provide enough rope to hang yourself with. See also just about any other meme here about OOP

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