Le plus ça change

As I seem to be fond of recalling, a long time ago, I was a Visual Basic programmer. In those days, I wrote useful business applications for market research firms. When I would discuss my code with Java programmers, I can recall their criticism of Visual Baisic: it is NOT truly object oriented.

I was amused to see the Spring framework – that is the way I had to program in VB, but I did not call it inversion of control. Today, I was flipping through Head First Design Patterns, and I was amused to see the design principle on page 23: Favor composition over inheritance. In VB, I did not have a choice, but I was happy and productive, and so were my clients.

That does not mean that I have no use for inheritance, but I have seen it over used. I am happy to see that my gut feelings about the Java code I was seeing about 10 years ago were on the money. I have been wrong about so many other things, it is nice to have been right about something.

VB did support interfaces, but this did mean that the programmer had to provide the implementation every time. I implemented my behavior as an object, and often passed the behavior in at runtime. That is what I had to do Рnow it is the hottest new way of doing things. Le plus ̤a change . . .