Object-oriented languages can potentially make a great contribution to enhancing software quality and supporting the software engineering process. Despite this potential, we contend that a number of central features of object-oriented languages are in fact contrary to well-known software engineering principles and goals and therefore represent a hindrance to software engineering rather than a contribution. In this paper we look at the class construct, inheritance, genericity and at object-oriented collection frameworks and suggest ways these could be modified to better supporting software engineering principles.
Index Terms:
object-oriented language design, software engineering, classes, collections
Citation:
Mark Evered, Gisela Menger, J. Leslie Keedy, Axel Schmolitzky, "Software Engineering Despite Object-Orientation," acsc, pp.66, Australasian Computer Science Conference, 2000