letters;to;the;editor
DOI: 10.1145/1839676.1839678
how to think about objects

Though I agree with Morde- chai Ben-Ari’s Viewpoint “Objects Never? Well, Hard- ly Ever!” (Sept. 2010) saying that students should be introduced to procedural programming before object-oriented programming, dismissing OOP could mean throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

OOP was still in the depths of the research labs when I was earning my college degrees. I was not exposed to it for the first few years of my career, but it intrigued me, so I began to learn it on my own. The adjustment from procedural programming to OOP wasn’t just a matter of learning a few new language constructs. It required a new way of thinking about problems and their solutions.

That learning process has continued. The opportunity to learn elegant new techniques for solving difficult problems is precisely why I love the field. But OOP is not the perfect solution, just one tool in the software engineer’s toolbox. If it were the only tool, we would run the risk of repeating psychologist Abraham Maslow’s warning that if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail.

Learning any new software technique—procedural programming, OOP, or simply what’s next—takes time, patience, and missteps. I have made plenty myself learning OOP, as well as other technologies, and continue to learn from and improve because of them.

For his next sabbatical, Ben-Ari might consider stepping back into the industrial world for a year or two. We’ve learned a great deal about OOP since he left for academia 15 years ago.

Jim humelsine, neptune, nJ
evaluating Research:
hypercriticality vs.
Radical empiricism

In his Viewpoint “Is Computer Science
Truly Scientific?” (July 2010), Gon-
zalo Génova suggested that computer
science suffers from “radical empiri-
cism,” leading to rejection of research
not supported by empirical evidence.
We take issue with both his claim and
(perhaps ironically) the evidence he
used to support it.

author’s Response:

I’m glad to hear from Barr and Bird that there are healthy subfields in CS in this respect. I used “inductive justification” to support the claim that many classical works in the field are more theoretical and speculative than experimental, not to support an argument that CS suffers today from “radical empiricism.” Investigating the latter through exhaustive empirical surveys of reviews would require surveyors being able to classify a reviewer as a “radical empiricist.” If my column served this purpose, then I am content with it.

Gonzalo Génova, madrid, spain

conclude with the conclusions

The Kode Vicious Viewpoint “Present-
ing Your Project” by George V. Neville-
Neil (Aug. 2010) made several debat-
able points about presentations, one of
which was inexcusable: “…I always end
with a Questions slide.”
You have just given a 25-minute
technical presentation to an educat-
ed, knowledgeable, technical audi-
ence. Using a series of slides, you have
explained your problem, described
your solutions, discussed your experi-
ments, and finally concluded, display-
ing each slide for a minute or two.
Your penultimate slide summarizes
the whole presentation, including its
“takeaway” message—everything you
want your listeners to remember. Now
you expect to spend four or five min-
utes answering questions. The slide
you show as you answer will be on
screen two or three times longer than
any other slide.