This piece examines the response to decentralizing reponsibility from the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) perspective. Decentralizing responsibility generally creates more objects and upon first examination most programmers fail to understand the advantage. This is because their education generally involved the solution of problems that rewarded their ability to create small cute programs and not the solution of problems rewarding their ability to create coherent and loosely-coupled classes containing methods responsible for doing only one thing. Upon refactoring their solutions to systems containing more objects, the typical response is to question how this leads to a simpler system. Their education did not prepare them for creating complex software systems composed of harmoniously working objects. Their education layed the groundwork for creating hopelessly complex, difficult to maintain and impossible to change nightmares commonly referred to as "Big Balls of Mud" [1]. Being an object-oriented programmer is more than incorporating byzantine thinking into a program running with an object-oriented language. A true object-oriented programmer knows how to think on a higher level. A level that is amenable to building much larger systems that are easy to maintain and change.
REFERENCES
1. The Big Ball of Mud paper is in my opinion a must read for anyone interested in enterprise-level software creation. This paper reveals the sticky problems of integrating the ideals of software creation with the reality of the contemporary corporate IT workplace.
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