Agreed. I find the best advice comes from people who have built significant systems that are both complex and innovative for their time. Rob Pike and Dennis Kernighan's The Practice of Programming is one of my favorites for this reason.
They tend to recommend solutions that are highly dependent on the problem to be solved.
Trying it the other way round, i.e. fitting the problem to an idealized solution, rarely works, and I find this is what I see a lot when I see people who place an emphasis on being "object-oriented" as opposed to just solving the problem with minimum redundancy but not twisting their code to do it.
As an example, creating a function and calling it twice from two similar classes is much easier to read than inventing an intermediate class that is an ancestor of the two (something I see very often from the hardcore OO folks).
"As an example, creating a function and calling it twice from two similar classes is much easier to read than inventing an intermediate class that is an ancestor of the two (something I see very often from the hardcore OO folks)."
You really see this a lot? As far as I can remember using inheritance over composition for de-duplicating code has been considered bad practice in OO circles for at least 15 years.
Wow, that's terrible, but I'd prefer if you referred to those people as "out of date OO people" as opposed to "hardcore OO people". Even though I don't consider myself a "hardcore OO" person now, when I did this would bother me.
They tend to recommend solutions that are highly dependent on the problem to be solved.
Trying it the other way round, i.e. fitting the problem to an idealized solution, rarely works, and I find this is what I see a lot when I see people who place an emphasis on being "object-oriented" as opposed to just solving the problem with minimum redundancy but not twisting their code to do it.
As an example, creating a function and calling it twice from two similar classes is much easier to read than inventing an intermediate class that is an ancestor of the two (something I see very often from the hardcore OO folks).