[Harbour-users] Re: OOP, ORMs etc

[dougf at people.net.au]

 Hi all

 Loving this discussion!

 I'm an old programmer who wrote procedural code for many years and paid
scant regard to OOP when the theoreticians started to push it.  Now I'm a
bit of a convert.  That happened through a rather ambitious project from
the pre .Net days that built web pages that behaved like traditional
programmes "on the fly" and did some of the things that I understand .Net
does well before Microsoft got around to it.  It is still used to this
day.  The point is that when I looked at the structure of the data base
that I had to build to hold the specification of the application what I
had seemed to correspond pretty much to the language of OOP.

 Up until then I had used OOP a bit (when forced to pretty much) but that
experience opened ny eyes a bit.  I still didn't write much OOP type code
until I discovered Harbour.  Even then it took a while as I started off
where I had left Clipper coding probably 10 years before.  But once I got
the hang of it again and saw how beautifully it fitted into the xBase
language and how you could hide the details if you so desired, I find
myself even thinking in terms of objects / classes etc most of the time.

 If OOP isn't suitable for your application then don't use it and forget
the theorists BUT please remember that if OOP approach is making things
more complex, slower etc it MAY not be that OOP is unsuitable, but rather
that your application of OOP may be sub optimal.

 I would love to share the architecture of my client-server data base back
end (written in Harbour) and / or code but I have to drive kids to school
just at the moment.

 Regards to all
 xProgrammer

 BTW I love cBase, OOP and client-server architecture, am not fond of SQL
and loathe UML