Re: Reactions to OO-Perl

[tommyw]

I did much of myl earning (computing degree) just as OO was becoming fashionable, but before it got into my course content. So I've known of it's existance for a long time, but never used it. The texts I've started reading about OO cover encapsulation, and I think "but I can do that anyway" and then inheritance (usually with very artificial examples: is a circle a parent or child of an ellipse?).

So I've got turned off the idea of OO because the official approach to it takes far to long working through the basics before presenting me with anything genuinely new.

On the other hand I've found the perldoc explanations (perltoot) amazingly useful: they take the attitude "you already know how to program. Why would you want to use OO techniques as well" Which is exactly the approach I want. I don't have any difficulty writing simple OO code. Now I just need to find something that's actually better written using OO than by normal methods.

(For comparison, on that last point: I've had to write some C libraries at work to make our Oracle database provide the same API as our really, really old Unify system. Then the existing code doesn't need to be rewritten. I've implemented an equivalent of DBI and DBD::Oracle in C. It works great, 'cos I really like the DBI interface, but it's not OO, where the original is. I don't notice any difference in use.)