Class Constructors considered harmful

PREFACE: There is a school of thought in computer programming that Classes are harmful in certain ways, but the basis for those arguments are very programming-technique specific.  This essay is about a much more general, mind-set oriented, objection.

My basic project these days is to learn Philosophy 101 and contemplate what impact that knowledge should have on software development practices.  After reading topics like the Philosophy of "becoming", and Aristotle's "four causes", it is clear that Philosophers spend much more time trying to define the circumstances of an entity's creation than do system analysts and programmers. While Philosophers have long been concerned with WHY did WHO do WHAT to cause an object to come into being, programmers are mostly concerned with the mechanics of HOW an object should be constructed.  It strikes me that this is due to the tunnel vision encouraged by the class constructor method.  [And, due to destructors and automated garbage collection, an even worse situation applies to object “death”.] So, to paraphrase a famous title, I (albeit tongue-in-cheek) consider Class Constructors harmful.

CASE STUDY: At a recently defunct Top-5 bank, I uncovered the fact that there were major incompatibilities in data being used to produce credit scores for borrowers and their loans. The scores depended on a grade generated for a "facility". The problem was that the very concept and definition of "facility" was not the same in various parts of the bank. If they had answered the following simple questions, they would have realized that they were not talking about the same thing: When and why does a new facility come into existence, and when/why does it cease to exist.

In the course of analysis and requirements gathering, a major goal is to identify and define the various business domain entities. But, in a vicious cycle, the definition of an entity is often too shallow with regard to its birth and death because “causal” information often stagnates as merely background text in some requirements document.  This is because programmers have no standard place to put that logic into the code.

Object oriented practice has one put "all" the properties and behavior associated with an entity into its Class definition, where "all" for class Dog means "the dog, the whole dog, and nothing but the dog"[1].  However the "nothing but the dog" constraint means that, the logic involved in deciding whether an instance of class X should be created, is not normally a method of class X.  Since the "cause" of X's instantiation usually involves other classes, that logic lies outside of X proper, thus, standard development methodologies leave the analysis of causation and purpose out of the design of class X.  Even Factory classes are focused on object construction, rather than why it should be constructed, and why now, and by whom.

The Mediation pattern comes to mind as a place to put this sort of logic because it involves multiple classes.  The logic that decides it is time for a Sculptor to use a Chisel to carve a Statue out of a block of Marble doesn’t belong solely in any of those classes.  A programmer would be tempted to put a “carve” method in Sculptor since that is a “behavior” of the sculptor, but Philosophy considers it an essential part of the definition of the statue itself.  And that is a problem with Mediator classes in the first place; the desire to have everything relevant to X be “nearby in the source code” (a raison d'être for classes) is defeated when some of it is off in various Mediators.  Having the teleology of Statue off in some CarveMediator isn’t much better than it residing in Sculptor.carve().

With event-driven systems (e.g. MOM, SOA), the series of events that trigger the creation of an entity instance may be complex. And whether event-driven, or "batch processing", the sub-systems are often distributed, increasing the value of encapsulating this logic in a single place. With Java EE and service oriented designs, there would be value in having the entity services include this logic.

In any event, I believe that there is a need to learn from Philosophy that their concept of "form" (which is the equivalent of OOP's class) has always included the purpose of a thing as well as its blueprint.

[1] Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Grady Booch,  1991