Object-oriented software construction

Object-Oriented Software Construction presents the methods and techniques of object-oriented design, based on a careful assessment of the underlying software-engineering issues. The book reviews both the techniques needed to obtain the full extent of the approach and object-oriented systems design, with emphasis on effective module-interface design. Numerous examples of reusable software components are presented covering many of the important everyday programming structures. The ideas and concepts are made concrete by realizing them in the Eiffel object-oriented programming language. (Back cover copy)

What Hacker News says

rramadassJan 2026

> OOP is non-scientific and the snake-oil hype ... ridding the world of the OOP rot is a far deeper infection.

You are spewing nonsense.

Read Bertrand Meyer's Object-Oriented Software Construction, Barbara Liskov's Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design and Brad Cox's Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach for edification on OOD/OOP.

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fuzztesterJul 2025

What about Eiffel?

What are people's thoughts about it?

I know a little about its history, and had tried it out a bit, some years ago, via the EiffelStudio trial edition, IIRC. I had also read a good chunk of Bertrand Meyer's book, Object Oriented Software Construction. Thought the book was good.

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rramadassJan 2025

Like most articles on "Inheritance" this is clueless about providing any "real meaning/understanding". People always take the soundbites (eg. Uncle Bob SOLID) provided as a mnemonic as being the end-all, don't fully understand the nuances and then usually arrive at a wrong conclusion.

LSP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liskov_substitution_principle) has to do with behavioural subtyping guaranteeing semantic interoperability between types in a hierarchy. It involves not just the syntax of function signatures but their semantic meaning involving Variance/Invariance/Covariance/Contravariance and their guarantees using an extension to Hoare Logic i.e. Preconditions/Postconditions/Invariants (derived from Meyer's DbC). Thus without enforcing the latter (which is generally done via documentation since there is no syntax for expressing pre/post/inv directly in most languages) the former is incomplete and thus the complete contract is easily missed/forgotten leading to the mistaken belief "Inheritance is bad". The LSP wikipedia page links to all the concepts, the original papers and more for further clarification.

See also Bertrand Meyer's Using Inheritance Well from his book Object Oriented Software Construction, second edition book - https://archive.eiffel.com/doc/manuals/technology/oosc/inher...

Finally see Barbara Liskov's own book (with John Guttag) Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design for a "correct approach" to OOP. Note that Java is just used as a example language while the principles are language independent.

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fuzztesterNov 2024

I know Eiffel is not very popular, but it's quite an interesting language. I had tried out EiffelStudio some years ago; the trial edition. I didn't write much code in it; I mainly just built and ran some of the example programs.

I had used assertions a fair amount in C projects years ago, so the DbC feature of Eiffel is what initially got me interested in it.

But it has many other good language features, IMO.

I had also read a good chunk of the Object-Oriented Software construction book by Bertrand Meyer, creator of Eiffel, again some years ago.

That book was quite good too (and quite thick) and, IIRC, it is still available as a free download on the net.

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rramadassAug 2024

The inventor of Objective-C, Brad Cox wrote the classic Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach where he defines the concept of "Software-IC" for "Software Component" based systems/design/programming. The underlying C language provides the gate/block-level granular abstractions while the OO features grafted on top provides the chip-level reusability with loose coupling. This is a great mental model to have while programming large systems. The book itself is a classic on how to evolve a language.

Brad Cox's above book and Bertrand Meyer's Object-Oriented Software Construction (using the Eiffel language) were my guides to Object-Oriented Design/Programming and Software Engineering in general and i am eternally grateful to them.

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cyrcJul 2023

Consider having a look at Object-Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer

https://bertrandmeyer.com/OOSC2/

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