CodeSOD: Objectified

Simon recently found himself working alongside a "very senior" developer- who had a whopping 5 years of experience. This developer was also aggrieved that in recent years, Object Oriented programming had developed a bad reputation. "Functional this, functional that, people really just don't understand how clean and clear objects make your code."

For example, here are a few Java objects which they wrote to power a web scraping tool:

class UrlHolder { private String url; public UrlHolder(String url) { this.url = url; }}class UrlDownloader { private UrlHolder url; public String downloadPage; public UrlDownLoader(String url) { this.url = new UrlHolder(Url); }}class UrlLinkExtractor { private UrlDownloader url; public UrlLinkExtractor(UrlDownloader url) { this.url = url; } public String[] extract() { String page = Url.downloadPage; ... }}

UrlHolder is just a wrapper around string, but also makes that string private and provides no accessors. Anything shoved into an instance of that may as well be thrown into oblivion.

UrlDownloader wraps a UrlHolder, again, as a private member with no accessors. It also has a random public string called downloadPage.

UrlLinkExtractor wraps a UrlDownloader, and at least UrlLinkExtractor has a function- which presumably downloads the page. It uses UrlDownloader#downloadPage- the public string property. It doesn't use the UrlHolder, because of course it couldn't. The entire goal of this code is to pass a string to the extract function.

I guess I don't understand object oriented programming. I thought I did, but after reading this code, I don't.

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