Polymorphism on Steroids – Dive Into Multiple Dispatch (Multimethods)

The common understanding of Polymorphism takes into account only the runtime type of the “receiving” object. That’s the implementation in most languages. But what if we also consider the method arguments as part of the runtime method resolution logic? That’s the idea behind “Multiple Dispatch.”

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The “Clash of Styles” Series – FP vs. OOP as a Daily Choice

The "Clash of Styles" series compare OOP and FP from a very practical standpoint. Modern general-purpose languages support both of the paradigms. Being conscious of that and choosing the right style for your use case is vital for ending up with an elegant and maintainable system.

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Clash of Styles, Part #6 – FP in OOP via the Visitor Pattern

The Visitor Pattern addresses a fundamental limitation of Object-Oriented modeling. In OOP, adding a new “operation” is tricky. You have to modify the existing classes, which is error-prone and violates OCP. Let’s look beyond the standard UML diagram and see how the Visitor solves this problem.

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Clash of Styles, Part #5 – Double Dispatch, or When to Abandon OOP

OOP is established to the point that we sometimes follow absurdly complicated “idiomatic” patterns(tricks). One example is the Double Dispatch technique, which is a quite puzzling chain of polymorphic calls. Let’s see it in action and compare it to a quite elegant Functional alternative.

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Clash of Styles, Part #4 – Adding Support for Rational Numbers with FP

FP or OOP is not a binary choice. You can have a healthy mix of the two in your program. Whatever paradigm you select to be central to your design, there will be cases when the other style fits better. Let’s start exploring this in Part #4 of the Clash of Styles series.

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Clash of Styles, Part #3 – Extensibility via OOP and FP

The choice between FP and OOP can directly affect the maintainability characteristics of your program. What is “easy” to add in OOP is “hard” in FP and vice versa. How can that be presented in terms of the Open-Closed Principle? What are some practical examples? Explore those topics in Part #3 of the Clash of Styles series.

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