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The whole Open Classes thing seems to be turning into another debate along the lines of static vs. dynamic typing or perhaps GOTO vs. Structured Programming. I’m all for a lusty debate about programming languages, it’s a definite interest of mine. But I’m going put out an appeal right now: this time around can we try something different?In the past, we (as in “we the blog echo chamber” or perhaps “we the programming.reddit.com flame wardens” or even “we the news.ycombinator.com mutual admiration society”) have fallen into the nasty habit of “negotiating for someone else.” Do you know what that is? It’s when you say, “Well, that’s fine with me, I can program Emacs to follow the Python indentation rules but Ralph over there hates being told how to format his source code.” Or perhaps you say, “Test-driven development is fantastic, but most programmers are too busy to write tests.” Not to mention when you say, “Parser combinators are fabulous, you can write a really good parser and eliminate all the accidental complexity, but when we outsource maintenance to India they won’t be able to understand my code.”Those are all valid concerns for somebody, but how about we let those people speak up for themselves, hunh? And it swings the other way, we can argue the Optimistic View about other people. But whether we’re optimists or pessimists, instead of debating things based on our perspective of their experience, let’s debate things based on our own experiences and our own honest likes and dislikes.As in—and this is my actual personal experience—“I can appreciate how dynamic typing—as exemplified by modifying open classes at run time—makes a program confusing. I feel the same way when I look at a Java program using extensive Dependency Injection driven by external XML configuration files, I have to pick my way through everything to figure out what is really going on at run time.” Note well the use of the word “I” and tyingobservation toactual experience.That is a very, very different thing than arguing about what might happen to someone else under different circumstances than the ones we live within. Not that there aren’t important things happening elsewhere: You and I are just two people on a planet of billions. But quite honestly, we can go crazy hypothesizing what other people will think and do. I have my hands full just figuring out what’s going on with my code on my projects.So let’s keep this personal, please. Let’s talk about our actual experience, please.Thank you.