The Tyranny of Object-Orientation
Eight days ago, I talked about the phenomenon whereby a programmer can be working on an EJB project for a prolonged period of time without actually knowing the details of EJB.
This happens on projects that's heavily OO/Framework based. What ends up happening is that a fantastic EJB based framework plus a build process is established early on. And all later activities happen on top of the framework.
This allows the bulk of the project to be around the framework and not EJB, which is a good thing all around, especially when the day comes when EJBs are out of fashion.
But there is one catch: it divides us programmers into the high-powered OO/Framework writers and the low-powered Business Object writers (or panel programmers who wrote not a line of Swing code, or web page authors who used no HTML tags).
OO is bad news to them because the knowledge they gained about (the use of) the framework is highly proprietary and in most cases non-transferable:
Interviewer: Do you know how to write OO programs?
Programmer: I know how to write business objects for our ABC OO framework.
Interviewer: Do you know anything about patterns?
Programmer: Our ABC framework is full of patterns but I wrote none of it.