5 - THINK LIKE AN OBJECT

Summary

This was the first article I wrote after the big splash. I was asked to write the article for a special issue on objects, “something about CRC cards.” I remember re-reading the “Laboratory…” article and thinking, “I can't do anything better than that. That article says it all.”

After a brief pause for a personal crisis, I thought, “What the hell. I'll just write the same stuff with different words.” What came out, though, was very different. The original CRC article convinced bright people that CRC was a good idea. This one convinces regular engineers that they, too, can get started with objects.

Ward's goal when we wrote together was to write prose that fairly dripped with meaning. You could read the same sentence every six months and get new meaning out of it. The result is complex, dense, evocative, and sometimes hard to read.

This article is the first time I found my own voice. My writing voice is much plainer than Ward's. I write like I speak: plain and direct (although I generally use fewer expletives when I write). Both Ward's style and mine are directly at odds with my academic training, which was to layer any possible meaning behind layers of jargon, notation, and convoluted sentence structure. I suppose it's no wonder it took me a while to get over that.