Live data from Hacker News

All evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013)

blog.pivotal.io

71–80 of 126 posts

Re: All evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013)

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus christ you really destroyed any chance anyone had of taking your point seriously by just throwing in some racism.

I'm a misogynist as well. How does that affect my argument? That's the point of throwing in a controversial example: no matter how you feel about an issue, reality is still out there, with hard edges and sharp points. If you ignore it and go the "everything is just as good"-way, you suffer. You may feel good about yourself, but you still do worse.

That approach does not meet the norms of the HN community because it doesn't make anyone smarter or better informed and it devolves the discussion...notice now we are not talking about OOP here.

Please consider deleting your comments.

Re: All evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013)

#72
post #54

This article is just pointing at the flaws, not really offering any alternative. It is just as GP said, a rant better kept for the water cooler area. You can guess that functional programming is going to be his response I suppose considering this page is the second part of a functional programming article. (the first part being missing) If you want to analyse, you would need to also talk about what OOP is good at and…

> At the end of the day, for general programming, any paradigm is going to end up producing similar quality of code. Developer competence

I'd say that "pure" paradigms tend to be almost equally bad (tried functional programming in production code, wasn't all it's advertised to be). But this actually leaves you with more freedom, because you have to pick pieces and create your own style. So it turns out to be more important, not less, that you understand the how and why of each paradigm.

As for how good this particular article was - well, I agree with the premise and it gives links to sources. May not be the Mona Lisa of articles, but it got my upvote. I'm not a regular HN reader so it's the first article on this topic I've seen in a while.

Re: All evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013)

#73
post #7

Can someone make a chrome extension to filter out the OOP vs FP articles on hacker news? I mean, how many more articles do we need? Is there anything new? Yes, FP is cleaner. Yes, OOP is useful for things like plugins. Yes, favor composition over inheritance. Yes, FP is impossible to read. Yes, immutability has its limits. Yes, Yes, Yes. Enough already.

The filter exists. It is community + flag. It works in all browsers.

Re: All evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013)

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus christ you really destroyed any chance anyone had of taking your point seriously by just throwing in some racism.

I'm a misogynist as well. How does that affect my argument? That's the point of throwing in a controversial example: no matter how you feel about an issue, reality is still out there, with hard edges and sharp points. If you ignore it and go the "everything is just as good"-way, you suffer. You may feel good about yourself, but you still do worse.

You have no understanding of postmodernity. It basically shows that the way you think is to project reality with all its degrees of freedom onto an axis that you arbitrarily decided and that allows you to give an order to the world and to classify things as being better than others. For instance, you seem to think that striving for getting better grades is "good", but this is not granted, who said so? God? Science? This is indeed a very modernist thinking.

The problem with it is basically that you posit your view as being right before reasoning. The arguments you may have on any subject will be subjected to how you see the world in the first place. Your arguments for being misogynist probably hold perfectly together - in the value system that you constructed for yourself. They will certainly not hold in mine. Postmodernism asks "what if there was not one unique value system?" The fact that you don't understand that means that you can't be part of a productive discussion, because you will always think you're right.

Re: All evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013)

#75
post #44

The best way to see through language paradigm war propaganda is to look at pseudocode. Scientists, mathematicians, logicians write tons of pseudocode and it's almost entirely procedural.

As one of those people who have used pseudocode in papers, I have to disagree. In a scientific paper, you describe what you have in mind using mathematical definitions. This makes it easier to reason about (proofs) and to describe it in an unambiguous way to other people (papers). Pseudocode is used to describe an algorithm following those mathematical definitions. In your paper, you might use sets. A set is defined by what it contains or does not contain. Never by how the elements found their way into the set. Including that kind of implementation detail is considered bad form (cf. forest and trees). If you wish to implement it using purely procedural code, FP, or OOP is up to you. Don't think scientists shun any kind of method just because they rarely talk about it. And for the record, I remember a number of papers that used pseudocode that could have been directly translated to working code using an OOP paradigm.

Re: All evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013)

#76
As a comment indicates, all evidence points to this article being a load of bullshit. There's not a single concrete example in it that proves anything of the author's claim. To counter, I think this will do nicely: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/07/31/the-success-of-oop/

Re: All evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013)

#77
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a misogynist as well. How does that affect my argument? That's the point of throwing in a controversial example: no matter how you feel about an issue, reality is still out there, with hard edges and sharp points. If you ignore it and go the "everything is just as good"-way, you suffer. You may feel good about yourself, but you still do worse.

You have no understanding of postmodernity. It basically shows that the way you think is to project reality with all its degrees of freedom onto an axis that you arbitrarily decided and that allows you to give an order to the world and to classify things as being better than others. For instance, you seem to think that striving for getting better grades is "good", but this is not granted, who said so? God? Science? T…

> The fact that you don't understand that means that you can't be part of a productive discussion, because you will always think you're right.

You actually managed to make me laugh. As it happens, that's pretty much my idea of postmodernism, which I dislike just as much after your (very well-written) reminder. But doesn't it strike you as ironic that you just managed to attack everything I have to say even before I say it with what it looks like a well-placed ad-hominem, while at the same time saying that it's me who is destroying productive conversation?

Re: All evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013)

#78
post #64

"All evidence" seems to me a real gross overstatement here. The author collected some topics, where he means that OOP is bad and sticks some (partly related) statements of other people to it and wants to convince with that, even when he makes some valid points here [1]. I do not buy that. The reality is, that when OOP is correctly executed (and there is the real culprit, since few people have really understand it!) i…

> it really can help you to lower the complexity of programs Yet to be proven. I never seen a single example of OOP bringing anything but more unnecessary complexity.

Than you might not have seen good OOP designs. My experience is different -- when you really apply good OOP design to software, you can reduce complexity and come to a clearer overall design. But of course the typical 5 day Java or C++ course will not get you there. You must learn to think in OOP -- and that is a process that might take years.

Re: All evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013)

#79
post #58

To me, as a C++ programmer, none of this really matters. I'm working on a very compute-intensive program with a lot of modules, used in professional settings. It has to go fast. If using C++ means we can go faster than someone using whatever else, at the expense of needing five times the people and six times the development effort, we'll pick C++. We're interested in the maximum performance achievable with the langua…

Check out Julia ' s Cxx.jl. it's probably the best c++ FFI in any language. You can even evaluation and call cpp code on the fly from the repl

Re: All evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013)

#80
post #5

> Extremist languages like Java force you to think of everything in terms of objects. Erm, Java is by far not the most OO programming language there is. For example, primitive types are not objects (no, auto-boxing doesn't make them objects). > But is Object Orientation (OO) a good idea? Probably as good as any other programming paradigma out there. > Does it have problems? Sure, like every other language as well. >…

Skip the fluffy blog and just watch Zed's talk linked to in the first paragraph. Whether you agree or disagree, he at least lays out some valid points (in his typical "this sucks, fuck you" style). That talk made me think a lot more than this blog post did. https://vimeo.com/43380467

Good talk and I agree with all his points. Perhaps WebAssembly will pave the way.
Post reply on HN