Mike Gerwitz

Activist for User Freedom

Adding 1 and 1 in PHP

2013-03-09

An amusing demonstration; it is my hope that readers will not take this PHP library seriously. This is likely a parody of the over-engineering that often takes foot in Object-Oriented development (a game of “how many GoF1 design patterns can we use in this project” anyone?).

That is not to say that “OOP is bad” (just as object-oriented developers often consider procedural code bad, when they may just be terrible at writing procedural code). Indeed, I wrote an ECMAScript framework for Classical OOP (ease.js). The problem is that, with the excitement and misunderstandings that surround “good” object-oriented design, designers are eager to over-abstract their implementations (I have been guilty of the same thing). Object oriented programming is often taught to novice CS students (often with the reign of Java in schools)—teaching practices that can be good principles when properly applied and in moderation—which I have also seen contribute to such madness.

Abstractions are highly important, but only when necessary and when they lead to more concise representations of the problem than would otherwise occur (note that some problems are inherently complicated and, as such, a concise representation may not seen concise). I’m a strong advocate of DSLs when abstractions begin to get in the way and increase the verbosity of the code (languages with strong macro systems like lisp help eliminate the need for DSLs written from scratch)—design patterns exist because of deficiencies in the language: They are “patterns” of code commonly used to achieve a certain effect.

Criticisms against OOP are abundant, just as every other paradigm.


  1. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. ISBN 0-201-63361-2. Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides (the “Gang of Four”).↩︎