Monday 1 January 2007
by Huw Collingbourne, Dermot Hogan
Dermot Hogan, a long-time OOP-sceptic, is now the lead developer of an OOP IDE. Here he debates the pros and cons of Object Orientation with OOP-convert, Huw Collingbourne…
Huw: Back in June 2005, you wrote a column in which you argued that Object Oriented Programming (OOP) has turned out to be a failure. In the period since then, you and I have been working on the Ruby In Steel IDE written for one object oriented language (Ruby) and written (largely) in another object oriented (...)
For many years I shared your prejudice in this usage. However, I now accept that ‘oriented’ is both the more widely used form and is etymologically preferable (‘orientate’ is a 19th Century back-formation from ‘orientation’).
As an intransitive, ‘to face in some specific direction, originally and especially to the east’ (an ecclesiastical term), orientate is correct; in all other sense to orient is preferable.
