Separate Use from Construction

Moving from a procedural approach to an object-oriented one, with all its assumed benefits, tends to add an additional issue: instantiation. Whereas a procedural program or script tends to load, run, and then unload, the creation of object instances can be much more involved, and can continue throughout the runtime lifecycle of the software. Given this, developers often feel that solving “the instantiation” problem is job one. It is decidedly not. Also, typically instances will be created by the same code that uses them, often proximate to their use. This would seem to make the code more readable and easier to work with, but it often has a negative affect. We will examine these issues, among others that arise when one fails to separate the use of an instance from its construction.