A Programmer's Prerogative on Objectification
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from the user '@Muslimorange', who has a Spongebob Squarepants profile picture. The tweet, set against a dark blue background, contains the text: 'if you aren't a programmer stop treating people like they are objects'. The humor is a clever pun based on the double meaning of the word 'object'. In general society, treating people like objects means to dehumanize them. However, in computer science, particularly in object-oriented programming (OOP), an 'object' is a fundamental building block of code. The tweet humorously implies that programming is the only profession where it is acceptable and necessary to 'treat things as objects', creating a funny piece of gatekeeping humor that resonates with any developer familiar with OOP principles
Comments
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I tried to model my family using OOP, but I got a composition over inheritance problem when my son claimed to be an instance of 'Person' and not just 'ChildOfMe'
Funny how the same folks who dereference you in real life never bother to run a null-check on their own empathy variables
After twenty years of OOP, I still can't figure out if my coworkers are instances of Colleague or just poorly implemented singletons with race conditions
The irony is that after years of practicing composition over inheritance, we still can't seem to compose healthy human relationships - though we've gotten quite good at instantiating new instances of social awkwardness
People aren’t objects - if empathy needs instanceof checks, your culture’s coupling is the real bug
Programmers objectify professionally: with encapsulation, inheritance, and zero runtime reflection on it
At least in OOP, objects get encapsulation; in enterprise we mark humans public and then complain about the coupling