Section 15.1. Using OO

15.1. Using OO

Make object orientation a choice, not a default.

There are plenty of excellent reasons to use object orientation: to achieve cleaner encapsulation of data; to better decouple the components of a system; to take advantage of hierarchical type relationships using polymorphism; or to ensure better long-term maintainability.

There are also plenty of reasons not to use object orientation: because it tends to result in poorer overall performance; because large numbers of method calls can reduce syntactic diversity and make your code less readable; or just because object orientation is simply a poor fit for your particular problem, which might be better solved using a procedural, functional, data flow, or constraint-based approach^[*].

^[*] An excellent starting point for exploring these alternatives in Perl is the book Higher-Order Perl, by Mark Jason Dominus (Morgan Kaufmann, 2005).

Make sure you choose to use OO because of the pros and despite the cons, not just because it's the big, familiar, comfortable hammer in your toolset.