The Car Example for OOP

The `Car extends Vehicle` or `Duck extends Bird` type of tutorial obscures more than it illuminates. In good OO programming, we don’t make class hierarchies in order to satisfy our inner Linnaeus. We make class hierarchies in order to simplify the code by allowing different parts of it to be changed independently of each other, and to eliminate duplication (which comes to the same thing). Without any context as to what the code needs to accomplish, you can’t make a judgment about whether...

 The Bird Clouds

We supposed at first that the mental unity of these little avians was telepathic, but in fact it was not. It was based on the unity of a complex electromagnetic field, in fact on "radio" waves permeating the whole group. Radio, transmitted and received by every individual organism, corresponded to the chemical nerve current which maintains the unity of the human nervous system. Each brain reverberated with the ethereal rhythms of its environment; and each contributed its own peculiar theme to...

 The Farmer Hypothesis

The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire...

 The Nominal Fallacy

The nominal fallacy is the error of believing that the label carries explanatory information. An instance of the nominal fallacy is most easily seen when the meaning or importance of a term or concept shrinks with knowledge. One example of this would be the word “instinct.” “Instinct” refers to a set of behaviors whose actual cause we don’t know, or simply don’t understand or have access to, and therefore we call them instinctual, inborn, innate. Often this is the end of the expl...