Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

cs.otago.ac.nz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 396 posts

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#121

Post by wtracy »

gboudrias wrote: post #48
keithnz wrote: post #8

Everything sucks, they just all suck differently. I still think OO provides a pretty easy mental framework for programming. You can get good results. Bit of discipline without going crazy and it works really effectively. Despite its shortcomings.

Agreed. I remember thinking "what don't I get? Why do we need getters and setters?". After some years (and discovering Python), I realized there's nothing to get, it's just ridiculous overengineering 95% of the time. Same goes for a lot of stuff in OO. I attribute it to the corporate mindset it seems to thrive in, but I could be wrong.

In the original JavaBeans spec, getters and setters served two purposes:

1. By declaring a getter without a setter, you could make a field read-only.

2. A setter could trigger other side effects. Specifically, the JavaBeans spec allowed for an arbitrary number of listeners to register callbacks that trigger whenever a value gets changed.

Of course, nobody actually understood or correctly implemented all this, and it all got cargo culted to hell.

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#122

Post by bsder »

keithnz wrote: post #8

Everything sucks, they just all suck differently. I still think OO provides a pretty easy mental framework for programming. You can get good results. Bit of discipline without going crazy and it works really effectively. Despite its shortcomings.

> I still think OO provides a pretty easy mental framework for programming. You can get good results.

The problem is that OOP is a slate of something like 18 characteristics and no language ever picks the same choices.

That having been said, the big problem with (especially early) OOP is that "Is"/"IsA" (aka structural inheritance) is the primary abstraction. Unfortunately, "Is"/"IsA" is a particularly lousy choice--practically anything ("Contains" or "Accesses" or ...) is better.

Most of the modern languages designed in the past 10-20 years reflect this--"Traits"/"Interfaces" seems to be what everybody has settled around.

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#123

Post by rhblake »

It really should be noted that years later Joe changed his mind about OO and came to the realization that perhaps Erlang is the only object-oriented language :) From a 2010 interview:

..."I wrote a an article, a blog thing, years ago - Why object oriented programming is silly. I mainly wanted to provoke people with it. They had a quite interesting response to that and I managed to annoy a lot of people, which was part of the intention actually. I started wondering about what object oriented programming was and I thought Erlang wasn't object oriented, it was a functional programming language.

Then, my thesis supervisor said "But you're wrong, Erlang is extremely object oriented". He said object oriented languages aren't object oriented. I might think, though I'm not quite sure if I believe this or not, but Erlang might be the only object oriented language because the 3 tenets of object oriented programming are that it's based on message passing, that you have isolation between objects and have polymorphism.

Alan Kay himself wrote this famous thing and said "The notion of object oriented programming is completely misunderstood. It's not about objects and classes, it's all about messages". He wrote that and he said that the initial reaction to object oriented programming was to overemphasize the classes and methods and under emphasize the messages and if we talk much more about messages then it would be a lot nicer. The original Smalltalk was always talking about objects and you sent messages to them and they responded by sending messages back."

See https://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop (2010) for the full answer (and more), it's worth a read.

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#124

Post by weberc2 »

humanrebar wrote: post #112
weberc2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Binding data and functions together beats operating on global data visible to everything. One of the big wins of OOP is less exposed global data. “Passing state as parameters” is what solved the “everything operating on global state” problem. Binding functions and state permitted polymorphism/abstraction. > Multiple inheritance is seldom worth the headaches. Single inheritance is never worth the headaches. :) > Obj…

There are so many kind of polymorphism. Many of them do not require objects. Executing a closure is a form of polymorphism. As is manipulating a generic type.

Agreed, but objects are the implementation used in OO. (My point was not that they are the only implementation).

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#125

Post by bsder »

libria wrote: post #94
tombert wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly I'm somewhat of a FP fanboy, but I seriously cannot disagree with you more on this. Functional Programming (and Logic Programming) are better than other paradigms because, unlike Java (or C++, or C#...) there is an emphasis on correctness , and the people working on FP compilers (like Haskell and Idris) are utilizing mathematics to do this. No idea on your opinion on mathematics, but to me Math/Logic reign…

> How about having to create six different files Took me a few reads but it's better stated "six different classes". At first I was confused about why you rely on `java.io.File` for business logic. So, if I'm stuck on JVM, what's my FP alternative that compiles and runs comparatively? Clojure? Scala?

Clojure.

If I'm stuck in JVM-land, Clojure followed by straight, modern Java would be my choices.

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#126

Post by westoncb »

tootie wrote: post #12
keithnz wrote: post #8

Everything sucks, they just all suck differently. I still think OO provides a pretty easy mental framework for programming. You can get good results. Bit of discipline without going crazy and it works really effectively. Despite its shortcomings.

OO is the worst programming paradigm in the world except for all the others.

I think this is pretty insightful.

It's easy to hate on OO because of something along the lines of it not being a neat mathematical formalism, which can facilely be argued as strictly a deficiency: if you don't look too closely, it certainly appears as only a deficiency.

I think a deeper look inevitably runs into two things:

(1) certain domains are more easily approached through spare mathematical formalisms than others. E.g. if the domain you're modeling is already most easily thought about in terms of compositions of mathematical transformations, you should probably model it functionally.

(2) Finding a declarative characterization of the results you'd like, or a neat chain of functional compositions which produce it, typically takes more work up front. (For many projects, the initial work up front is worth it—but for lots and lots of others, it's essentially over engineering.)

OO is often not 'ideal,' but frequently, solidly pragmatic.

As a paradigm, the aesthetic behind it reminds me of TypeScript's designers intentionally foregoing soundness of the type system.

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#127

Post by Gatsky »

josephg wrote: post #68
peterashford wrote: post #15

I'm really sick of these 'why blah sucks' posts. Clearly OOP works for a lot of people. If it doesn't work for you, don't use it. My personal feeling is that FP works better when the problem domain is more data oriented, requiring transformation of data streams whereas OOP is good when the problem domain is about simulating or modeling where you want to think about interacting agents of some kind. The whole 'X is one…

When I was a tutor (TA) at university (collage) here in aus, I marked assignments from my students. We used an automated test suite to check correctness. I went over each assignment to subjectively assess code style. I would open the first assignment which scored full marks with the test suite and find it was a clean 500 line long implementation. Full marks. The next submission also got full marks, but it did it by s…

Thanks, this is a great comment.

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#128

Post by Misdicorl »

weberc2 wrote: post #95
kbp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important thing is restricting your public interface, hiding implementation details, and thinking about how easy your code (and code that uses it) will be to change later. It's not an OO vs anything thing. When you want a value from a module/object/function/whatever, whether or not it's fetched from a location in memory is an implementation detail. Java and co provide a short syntax for exposing that implementati…

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a useful “Getter” abstraction...

It's frustrating to read this thread and your comment kind of crystallized this for me so I'll respond to you.

Using an array without having to (manually) calculate the size of the objects contained within is like the major triumph of OO. This is a getter that you almost certainly use constantly.

Please try to consider your statements and potential counter factuals before spraying nonsense into the void

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#129

Post by hota_mazi »

rhblake wrote: post #123

It really should be noted that years later Joe changed his mind about OO and came to the realization that perhaps Erlang is the only object-oriented language :) From a 2010 interview: ..."I wrote a an article, a blog thing, years ago - Why object oriented programming is silly. I mainly wanted to provoke people with it. They had a quite interesting response to that and I managed to annoy a lot of people, which was par…

Both Alan Kay and Joe Armstrong struck me as having had the same attitude of trying to capitalize on the topic of object oriented programming, failing to recognize its importance, and then later trying to appropriate it by redefining it.

Not the best moment of these otherwise two bright minds.

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#130

Post by revvx »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #57
harimau777 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think what I'm about to say is necessarily inherently true, but it reflects how things seem to work in practice: It seems to me that part of the problem is that OO doesn't force you to have discipline and/or without constant vigilance (which product owners are never willing to schedule for) the system inevitably gets out of control over time. On the other hand, it seems to me that the core principles of funct…

Just my personal anecdote. The only functional programming languages I have extensive experience with are C and JS. I have NEVER seen a sensibly organized or maintained medium to large sized C or JS application. Every time it's been total chaos. In Java projects, there's a 50/50 shot of it being moderately sensible. I'm confident other people have completely different experience. Based on your post it sounds like you…

I think you're confusing procedural with functional. Modern Javascript has some support for functional idioms, but C is as far from functional programming as you get (nothing wrong with that, of course)
Post reply on HN