Re: Thoughts on teaching OO concepts to COBOL programmers

On Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:02:32 -0400, Joe Zitzelberger <zberger@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

But I would really appreciate hearing about your experiences going from
COBOL to any OO style of programming. What were your pitfalls, what was
helpful, etc.

One pitfall is they will find ways to turn OO design back into Cobol concepts. It will
happen during maintenance, after designers and developers have moved on. Suppose one
method requires a logic change. Instead of doing it the OO way, they'll copy and paste the
logic into their client program, just to change a few lines. Before you know it, there
will be ten slightly different versions of the method.

They will say a change to the base method would have required re-testing every application
that used it. This way requires testing only one. And an overload is inefficient.

If the object is a structure that will be stored in a database row, they'll replicate
fields into other structures stored in other tables. Their rationale will be efficiency
and simplification. No one will question how redundant unsynchrnized data makes the system
simpler.
.

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