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RailsConf 2015 - Nothing is Something

Confreaks · 84.3K views · 2015-04-30 · 35:53

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Overview

Sandi Metz argues that hidden assumptions in code are missing concepts, and shows how to name and expose them so code is easier to understand and change. It covers null objects and messages in Ruby.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a funny, smart and well-constructed talk on abstraction, duplication and object-oriented design.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2016–2024

Topics

Software architecture & designPython, Ruby & scripting languages
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sandi metzrubyabstractionnull objectrefactoring

What people said

crabmusket · 2024-11 · Strong recommendation

I'd like to mention that despite OOP being in the title, I thought this book had a lot to teach that isn't specific to OOP architecture or OOP languages. Really, I think the star of the show is TDD and refactoring. For a short intro to Sandi's style and approach, I always recommend this 35min talk: [VIDEO] Aside from any specifically educational content, as a talk it is fantastic - funny, smart, well put together.

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buren · 2016-02 · Strong recommendation

Couldn't agree more. Sandi Metz has an excellent talk touching on this topic. Developers exaggerated willingness to keep things DRY and elaborates a bit on why: it's one of the easiest things for a not-so-experienced developer to identify and one of the easiest things to teach. Edit: One of the best quotes from that talk is (paraphrased): "The wrong abstraction is a lot more expensive than duplicated code". [VIDEO]

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newtscamander · 2017-01 · Recommendation

The premise is the introduction is wrong. "so before we have written a single program in our language, before we know whether shared behaviour will be important in the applications that will be written in it" read the POODR book, or watch this [VIDEO] it explains how shared behavior works without code duplication and why people tend to mess it up.

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Sources

Video by Confreaks, played through YouTube.

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