At the OOP 2010 conference, Robert C. Martin will give a keynote about polyglot programming, called „The Polyglot Craftsman“.

Hey, Uncle Bob is back at OOP,! For me this is very special because it was him who brought me to object oriented design/programming and to my first OOP conference, ever. And this was back in 1992 when I was a enthusiastic software developer, coding in C. Java did not exist in those days, design patterns were not published, there was no TDD – well, it was just the old days of poorly maintainable code!

Bob, when I came into your workshop about object oriented design at OOP, you started with a very simple example in C++ (at least, I thought it was): a car with an engine. You said something like this:

Bob: „OK, guys, lets define an accelerate() method on the car – what would be inside the body of this method?“. And my head started thinking. Somebody else: „The car should tell the carburator to increase the fuel to air ratio. And it should also tell the automatic transmission to shift one gear up!“

Bob: „OK, so Car::accelerate() calls Carburator::increaseFuelToAirRatio(), followed by Transmission::shiftUp(). Question to all of you: Is this a good design or a bad design?“

And poor me, inexperienced in OOD, could say neither yes nor no: „In fact, I don’t know!“.

Bob, you suddenly shouted „Of course, it is a BAD design, very bad design!“

Me: „Oh, why this?“

Bob: „What if you have a Diesel engine, without carburator? And: What if your car has an electric engine, without transmission?“

Me: „Hmmm… well, I guess, I would have to change the design significantly. Something like Thyristor::increaseElectricCurrent().“

Bob: „Exactly! So, how about introducing a neutral abstraction above all this? How about Engine::increasePower()? And with an intelligent Engine class that knows how to increase the power purely by itself? With nobody telling it how to do that?“

Me: „Aha!“

And so 1992 was the year when I became enthusiastic about object oriented design. Thanks a lot, Bob – I am really looking forward to see you again at this OOP. I guess, you won’t remember me but this is not a problem. 🙂