I agree with the article, but to summarize my opinion on OOP/Design Patterns is that they lead to cleaner/more maintainable code and it works if you have a team of people that understand OOP real well. For teams that do not it ends up leading to MORE code (every OOP design pattern with a couple exceptions have more lines of code than their procedural counterparts) -> more bugs (more bugs/lines) -> harder to understand code and code takes longer to develop. OOP is not dead...its a tool and you need to know the tool to use it.

I've had years of procedural programming experience and perhaps that explains why I was a little late to adopt OOP concepts. Without further research on my own, I would have left college believing that OOP was all about inheritance. In our courses, we built ideal scenarios with requirements that were well defined. Our classes often had 8 or more layers of inheritance. In short, the projects we built were "perfect scenarios" unlike the projects we get in the real world. Little emphasis was put on design patterns and instead energy was spent on abstracting classes in a million different directions. Although a great demonstration of the capabilities of inheritance, the projects were far from being easily maintainable in a real world environment. Also without further research, for example, I was left without an understanding of why interfaces were so important, which pretty much left my clueless on the possibilities and power of design patterns.

All college did (for me) was create a VERY baseline understanding of OOP concepts. It wasn't until after college that my primary focus switched from building the most crazy abstraction imaginable to actually building maintainable and readable code.

Dang typos! We need a way to edit our comments!

Nah, senfo, that way we get to laugh at your mistakes!

Does ANY university teach OOP well? It seems like I spent two years buried under lisp and 5th normal forms before I ever saw an OO language. Its pretty sad that I had never heard of the GoF until after graduating.