I started out as a VBA programmer. This means I was looked down upon by the VB6 programmers… who in turn were looked down upon by Java programmers…. Ah, Java was so cool then.
Yeah, it stunk being a VBA guy. You always picked up these projects by some guy who was long gone. You had to add a feature or fix something and you just couldn’t figure out what was going on. Crap was being stored in global variables and all the work was being done on the event triggers of the GUI. What a nightmare! It’s a pain because the state of the program could appear to change randomly… and it was very hard to figure out by trial and error what it was that was breaking things. This lead to bug reports from clients that you couldn’t reproduce… and you ended up looking really incompetant. (Now I showcase my incompetance with blog entries like this. There– I said it before a commentor could say it for me!)
Well, Java programmers generally have more class than that. (The language forces them too. Heh.) But there are ways of introducing such CodeMunging in all languages, however fastidious they might be. It’s worse, though, when it’s introduced by a catchy Gang of Four design pattern that makes you sound cool to the uninitiated. But if you thought you could just cut and paste this stuff and automatically be a better coder, then I guess you get what you deserve. Yep, you too can bring all the joys of a crappy VBA debugging nightmare into just about any popular programming language: just get ahold of the “singleton pattern” and start applying it indiscriminantly and you can have all the pain of a classic VBA global variable munge-fest– even in a language that outlaws global variables outright!
I used a singleton once. Once. After first being annoyed that it wasn’t completely clear how to implement one in my language, I released one into the wild of a production system. “There should only be one of these objects in existence ever– therefore this MUST be my chance to finally apply this real live design pattern!” A classic hammer-looking-for-a-nail scenario. After letting it go, I had a distinct sinking feeling in my stomach. Somehow the experience wasn’t all that fulfilling. I moved on to other things and tried to avoid such pedantic NDD (Nerd-driven development) in live systems where other people would surely come after me and hate my guts for such pointless smarty-pantsness.
But now I know why the technique didn’t stay in my tool-kit. Sure, it ultimately didn’t pass my personal smell test… but could I articulate why? “In some cases they can make testing difficult and hide problems with your design,” says Google’s Dion Almaer. (Google has gone so far as to release a Singleton Detector to help people identify and remove Singletons from production code.) Yeah… that’s it. I knew there was a reason that my coder-sense was tingling….
In the mean time, if you aren’t an expert on Design Patterns… then watch out for questions about them in job interviews. Talking about them without understanding them is a good way to make yourself look stupid. A lot of those com-sci kids pushed out by the Java Schools nowadays use Singleton to un-OOP their OOP code. Don’t let a potential employer get you confused with them….
Learning Lisp 
July 29, 2007 at 1:06 am |
Huh. Well it sounds like there are some people who can’t handle OOP. It might help if people were taught the rationale behind it, rather than just the structure and technique. It might help prevent this “pattern abuse”. I never had any problems with singleton abuse, but I worked with people who used patterns with purpose, rather than just because it was “neato”.
I don’t mean this comment to be a slam against anybody. Programmers should use what they can handle. Simple as that.