So, I've been reading up on vB 5, mostly out of the trainwreck mentality, and a bit of curiosity about how it's shaping up[1] and one of the things I've seen is commentary from developers doing a sort of peer review.
It also brings to mind a conversation I've had in the last couple of days, about coding style, where I said that a fair chunk of Wedge's code is written 'SMF style', which is a completely fair assessment from my perspective; Nao and I spent so long writing for/with SMF that it's not really surprising that it has shaped how we do things. There are some more modern things - there are more classes and things like exceptions in the newer code, but it doesn't change the fact that it's still carrying a lot of SMF structure and mentality to it.
Now, there are some interesting debates about OOP and procedural coding out there (and we are more OOP than the past) but my real point is... does it actually matter?
The only people who are going to see the code are the people who are going to modify the code, either directly or through a plugin - and of course us, in development and bug fixing. Whether something uses OOP or not should not be a concern for most people - and even for the people who do have a concern because they use the code, I'm not entirely sure most of them understand all the ramifications - heck, I'm not entirely sure I do some of the time.
Having classes to bundle functionality can be important. But it doesn't have to be as important as some of the pundits and reviewers say it is.
What I do know, and believe in, is using the right tool for the job. OOP is a tool, nothing more, but a lot of the 'but it isn't OOP' stuff seems to drift into the realms of 'when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail'. There's good OOP, there's bad OOP, just as there's good and bad procedural code, and we have a strange mish-mash, some of which we've inherited and some of which we've fixed.
But how many people care? As long as it works, does it actually matter that much?
/discuss
It also brings to mind a conversation I've had in the last couple of days, about coding style, where I said that a fair chunk of Wedge's code is written 'SMF style', which is a completely fair assessment from my perspective; Nao and I spent so long writing for/with SMF that it's not really surprising that it has shaped how we do things. There are some more modern things - there are more classes and things like exceptions in the newer code, but it doesn't change the fact that it's still carrying a lot of SMF structure and mentality to it.
Now, there are some interesting debates about OOP and procedural coding out there (and we are more OOP than the past) but my real point is... does it actually matter?
The only people who are going to see the code are the people who are going to modify the code, either directly or through a plugin - and of course us, in development and bug fixing. Whether something uses OOP or not should not be a concern for most people - and even for the people who do have a concern because they use the code, I'm not entirely sure most of them understand all the ramifications - heck, I'm not entirely sure I do some of the time.
Having classes to bundle functionality can be important. But it doesn't have to be as important as some of the pundits and reviewers say it is.
What I do know, and believe in, is using the right tool for the job. OOP is a tool, nothing more, but a lot of the 'but it isn't OOP' stuff seems to drift into the realms of 'when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail'. There's good OOP, there's bad OOP, just as there's good and bad procedural code, and we have a strange mish-mash, some of which we've inherited and some of which we've fixed.
But how many people care? As long as it works, does it actually matter that much?
/discuss
| 1. | The answer is badly. Even fresh installs are taking 60+ queries to do simple pages. |
