Plurrrr

You can’t rule the development world for decades without attracting some enemies. And object-oriented programming, which provides the conceptual underpinning for dozens of languages old and new, certainly has some enemies.

Maybe that’s why we’ve suffered through a never-ending series of hot takes about OOP. They’ve described it as a productivity-destroying disaster, a set of deceitful programming patterns, and a mediocre tool designed to help poor programmers hide their incompetence. OOP was even proclaimed dead (14 years ago, so take that one with a grain of salt).

What all these rants have in common is that they point out (rightfully) some of the pitfalls in modern software design and then conclude (wrongfully) that this indicates a terrible rot at the core of the programming world. Yes, object-oriented programming doesn’t look so great if you conflate it with sloppy design practices and fuzzy architectural thinking. But are these crimes really an unavoidable part of OOP? Or are they just one of the wrong paths we sometimes wander as programming neophytes, armed with too much confidence and too much curiosity?

Most people who have come in contact with computer graphics know that aliasing commonly refers to jagged edges that occur when rendering triangles. In this article, we look at other manifestations of aliasing in 3D graphics, and attempt to theoretically unify them. We won't properly look at how to solve aliasing, only focusing on reasoning about the problem instead.

Many people hack together shell scripts quickly to do simple tasks, but these soon take on a life of their own. Unfortunately shell scripts are full of subtle effects which result in scripts failing in unusual ways. It’s possible to write scripts which minimise these problems. In this article, I explain several techniques for writing robust bash scripts.