Ian Bicking: the old part of his blog

Anti-usable libraries...

In Why Do Java Developers Like to Make Things So Hard? (printable version) James Turner explains exactly what I was talking about in my PyCon presentation:

Imagine if the Perl cafe and Javahut were across the street from each other. You walk into Javahut, and ask to sit down. "I'm sorry," says the person at the door. I'm not actually the hostess, I'm a Factory class that can give you a hostess if you tell me what type of seat you want." You say you want a non-smoking seat, and the person calls over a NonSmokingSeatHostess. The hostess takes you to your seat, and asks if you'll want breakfast, lunch, or dinner. You say lunch, and she beckons a LunchWaitress. The LunchWaitress takes your order, brings over your food, but there's no plates to put it on because you forgot to get a CutleryFactory and invoke getPlates, so the Waitress throws a null pointer exception and you get thrown out of the place.

Anyway, I need to go finish my notes on my presentation (slides alone are entirely useless).

Created 29 Mar '04
Modified 14 Dec '04