OO? OI? Oy Vay!
Clark Valberg recently convinced Hal Helms, Brian Kotek and Ben Nadel to do a recording together discussing OO programming in ColdFusion.
The discussion reminded me of an NPR debate I listened to several months ago on whether we should bomb Iran to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons (unfortunately, I don't remember the specific wording of the question). The debate had three experts on either side of the question. All six seemed to agree that we would almost certainly never need to bomb Iran because so many better options exist but that we should remove the option from the table (just in case). From there it quickly moved to a semantics debate about the wording of the question on the table.
The same thing with the NPR discussion you mentioned. You said that they had three experts that were "on the opposing side", but then you said that they all agreed that we would never need to bomb Iran. So NPR didn't really have an opposing view in that debate.
Let me make this clear: I am not saying that I am against OO nor am I in favor of bombing Iran. My own opinions are irrelevant to what I am saying here. I just think that these "debates" are false. A true debate would have opposing sides that are well informed and passionate about their respective arguments. Not just pretending.
I don't think it is a point that people are pretending to take opposing views. I think it is a problem of semantics. The debaters on the NPR debate really did have differences of opinion (as do Hal and Brian), but their differences weren't as large (in the case of the NPR debate) as they expected. They each landed on different sides of the same question based on how they interpreted the wording of the question.
In the case of the ColdFusion OO debate, I think it becomes a discussion of what it means to using Object Oriented Programming. For example, I use encapsulation, inheritance, composition, polymorphism, and separation of concerns. I would say, however, that I don't use OO. This for the simple reason that I don't use objects.
In the debate, Brian suggested using a service layer that followed OO principles as a way to "do OO" in ColdFusion. This is basically what I do, though I don't think of it as OO (again, because I don't use actual objects). This suggests that at least some of the disagreement is semantic in nature (what qualifies as OO?).
I'm hopeful that Brian's suggestion of OI will help to give some common ground for the discussion.