Why people still don't understand OO

[Ian Joyner]

Here is a medium article I wrote responding to the thought: "A lot of beginners either avoid OOP completely or overuse it everywhere."

https://medium.com/@ianjoyner/the-misunderstanding-of-oo-59de9225acbb

It explains why half-baked languages like Java, Python, and particularly C++ have misled programmers from the real benefits of OO, of course as realised in languages like Eiffel.

I hope the thoughts or article itself might be useful in explaining to many people who think they get OO that they don’t.

Ian

[Eric Bezault]

Too bad that the article does not mention Eiffel as a way
to use OO correctly ;-(

--
Eric Bezault <er...@gobosoft.com>
Eiffel expert - available for freelance work
https://www.gobosoft.com

[Bertrand Meyer]

Everyone in this group is genuinely interested in promoting the Eiffel approach but it is also important to reach out to the world at large. For example I note that some seasoned Eiffel experts in the group do not mention Eiffel among their LinkedIn skills, while listing things like JavaScript. Knowing Eiffel is not an infectious disease and advertising it will not cause you any harm. But then people consider Eiffel for their development, do the obvious search and conclude that there are not Eiffel programmers out there.

It's really great to see all the positive messages in this group; in my opinion they should be honed here and then reposted elsewhere where they will not just preach to the choir. It is amazing to see how much mere mentions -- they do not have to be paeans, or oaths of eternal fidelity, just mentions -- can do to reshape perceptions.

Any publicity including bad publicity, it is said, is better than no publicity. No publicity is, conversely, the worst kind. It is amazing to see how little the world hears about Eiffel and how easy it should be to correct that situation.

-- BM

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[Ian Joyner]

It does by implication. Lead people to the drink and let them drink for themselves. If it is too obvious people just dismiss you as promoting a particular language.

I don’t know why the reply is not posting to group generally.

[Ian Joyner]

I agree, we need more people out there posting on Quora, Medium, and others. I frequently post links to https://bertrandmeyer.com/OOSC2/.

I like Bertrand’s approach of setting expectations of what software development needs, the mechanisms, and then “here’s a language that does it” designed with those factors in mind.

Although we can’t overdo it. While bad publicity might be better than none, over publicity that just gets ignored as background noise does not achieve much.

I certainly would like to see more people around, not just in this group, maybe saying that Eiffel is a solution to my criticisms of other languages.

I’m still looking for a good link that I can use about Larry’s work on Claude and DbC to a documenting outlining the approach for others who know little about Eiffel or DbC.

Another thought. Some of these articles on Rust and Zig could also be published on Medium, and not just on eiffel.org.

Ian

[Eric Bezault]

Hi all,

On 30/05/2026 22:08, Bertrand Meyer wrote:
> Everyone in this group is genuinely interested in promoting the Eiffel approach but it is also important to reach out to the world at large. For example I note that some seasoned Eiffel experts in the group do not mention Eiffel among their LinkedIn skills, while listing things like JavaScript. Knowing Eiffel is not an infectious disease and advertising it will not cause you any harm.

For those of you who already mention (or just added) Eiffel among
their LinkedIn skills, please connect to me on LinkedIn (if not
already done), and send me a message. I'll be happy to endorse your
Eiffel skill to increase its visibility.

I also encourage everyone to endorse each other's Eiffel skill to
increase credibility.

[Ulrich Windl]

I think too many "OO tutorials" don't give you the full story, just some parts. But apart from tutorials a real "show application" is needed. Some years ago when looking into the Eiffel compiler source I didn't feel like it followed the pure OO doctrine. Maybe it's time to port Nethack to Eiffel 😉

If the Eiffel compiler isn't able to transform pure clean Eiffel code to compact and efficient code (usable for compilation), then we have a real problem.

Ulrich