OOPin' Through Christmas
Mar 24, 2024
You may be familiar with Advent of Code. If not, you should try it out. It's a lot of fun and provides some great exercises to work through.
What I want to do in this series of articles is illustrate some usages of object-oriented, test-driven development, and expressive domain code. For each problem, we'll treat the problem text as a business domain, and name our classes accordingly. We'll also use tests to shape and direct the implementation of some object-oriented code.
Why OOP? Don't You Know About "X"?
Yes, unfortunately I'm aware of the negative connotations floating around online about object-oriented programming these days. It's my firmly-held belief that there's not enough nuance in those discussions. Each paradigm is useful and it would be best for us to be able to mix and match those to suit the problem at hand.
In general, I believe object-oriented programming is a great fit for domain programming, not because it models "real world" objects, but because it models the business language, or the "Ubiquitous Language" as Eric Adams writes about in Domain Driven Design.
If you're unfamiliar with Advent of Code, each problem has two parts. The second part becomes available only after solving the first. What I hope to illustrate is the ease with which the second part can be solved by utilizing these methods. Sometimes the second part switches things up quite a bit, which is okay. In practice, many of our business requirements can change quite drastically.
Thanks For Reading!
I will continue to publish these as time allows. I hope that readers can get something positive out of all this. If you have questions or comments, please open an issue in this repository on GitHub.
Please note that the solutions here may seem a bit pedantic or overkill, but I don't necessarily think they are over-engineered. The goal is not to present the best algorithm to solve each problem, although we will keep efficiency in mind. The goal is to illustrate how test-driven development and good object-oriented principles can result in code that is easy to understand, change, and discuss with teammates and stakeholders.
Thank you all!