RailsConf 2015 - Nothing is Something
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as a funny, smart and well-constructed talk on abstraction, duplication and object-oriented design.
What it is
Sandi Metz argues that hidden assumptions in code are missing concepts, and shows how to name and expose them so code is easier to understand and change. It covers null objects and messages in Ruby.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2016 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec buren · 2016-02 · on “Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend”
Couldn't agree more. Sandi Metz has an excellent talk touching on this topic. Developers exaggerated willingness to keep things DRY and elaborates a bit on why: it's one of the easiest things for a not-so-experienced developer to identify and one of the easiest things to teach. Edit: One of the best quotes from that talk is (paraphrased): "The wrong abstraction is a lot more expensive than duplicated code". [this video]
Strong rec crabmusket · 2024-11 · on “99 Bottles of OOP now available in Python”
I'd like to mention that despite OOP being in the title, I thought this book had a lot to teach that isn't specific to OOP architecture or OOP languages. Really, I think the star of the show is TDD and refactoring. For a short intro to Sandi's style and approach, I always recommend this 35min talk: [this video] Aside from any specifically educational content, as a talk it is fantastic - funny, smart, well put together.
Recommends newtscamander · 2017-01 · on “Classes Considered Harmful [pdf]”
The premise is the introduction is wrong. "so before we have written a single program in our language, before we know whether shared behaviour will be important in the applications that will be written in it" read the POODR book, or watch this [this video] it explains how shared behavior works without code duplication and why people tend to mess it up.
Cites profalseidol · 2019-03 · on “Alan Kay on the Meaning of “Object-Oriented Programming” (2003)”
Here's one talk about 'message' in Ruby: RailsConf 2015 - Nothing is Something [this video] But to me, this simply looks like Functional Programming done in an OOP mess.
Cites ValentinTrinque · 2024-03 · on “Maybe Functions”
You do have another solution that can lower the amount of conditions: Null Objects. These don’t fit every use cases, but they can allow you to express what’s missing, or not defined, or empty, and avoid nil pointers dereference or conditions to check the state. As Sandy Metz is used to say « Nothing is Something »[0] 0: [this video]