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Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

cs.otago.ac.nz

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Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#131

Post by skndr »

hota_mazi wrote: post #129
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.

Didn’t Alan Kay coin the term “object oriented”?

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#132

Post by hota_mazi »

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.

Either you tell your objects what to do, which means they have mutable state, which means you are programming in an imperative way.

Or you get values from your objects. You need getters for this, but you can guarantee immutability and apply functional programming principles to your code.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. At the end of the day, you need values.

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#133

Post by weberc2 »

kbp wrote: post #108
weberc2 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're always using a getter. It's just a question of what syntax your language provides for different ways of getting values, and how much they say about your implementation. Most people don't have a problem with getters and setters, they have a problem with writing pure boilerplate by hand. Languages like Python and Lisp save you from the boilerplate and don't provide a nicer syntax for the implementation-exposing…

You misunderstood my post. I said I haven’t seen a useful getter abstraction. Not all data access is via a method nor is it always abstract.

I specifically object to the useless abstraction, not the boilerplate (boilerplate is cheap).

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#134

Post by hota_mazi »

skndr wrote: post #131
hota_mazi wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Didn’t Alan Kay coin the term “object oriented”?

That's what he claims but there's zero evidence besides his own word.

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#135

Post by revvx »

civility wrote: post #75
james-mcelwain wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this might be a little unfair to JavaScript. No doubt it's a multi-paradigm language, but there's a huuuge FP community in JS, and loads of code bases (esp. in React) are written in a very functional style. Definitely not comparable to passing function pointers around in C.

FP is different things to different people. For me, it's pure functions and a preference for purely functional data scructures (Okasaki style). Also to me, FP has an emphasis on avoiding mutating state. The second example on the React front page shows how to mutate state, and then they just build from there. I don't use React, but looking at those examples, it all looks very OO to me.

React with class-components is very OOP.

Hooks are closer to functional programming, though (but were released only a couple months ago)

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#136

Post by ddebernardy »

treis wrote: post #52
vhb wrote: post #31

Well, I disagree with 99% of this... I'm a guy that started with C, moved to functional programing, added C++, and now do all 3. > Objection 1. Data structure and functions should not be bound together Well, in my experience, in every almost every code-base (either from functional, or imperative programing), we end up with modules, witch are a set of function taking the same type as a parameter. This is very close to…

>Well, in my experience, in every almost every code-base (either from functional, or imperative programing), we end up with modules, witch are a set of function taking the same type as a parameter. This is very close to binding the functions and the types... And the world is not so neatly divided between things that just are (data structures) and thing that do things (functions). Take a date for example. The fact tha…

I'm not sure I'd agree that it being a Wednesday is a "just is" sort of thing. The point in time is a data point (on the time axis, if you will). A function then needs to place it in a calendar.

FWIW I'm struggling to come up with a good example of where the line between data and functions is clearcut, except perhaps when the data describes a function: an SQL string, some code that'll get eval'ed, etc.

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#137

Post by tux1968 »

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…

Isn't a method call a message, and the return value a message back? Or is it that "true OO" must be asynchronous?

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#138

Post by weberc2 »

westoncb wrote: post #110
weberc2 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

getArea() { return this.width * this.height; } getIcon() { // if icon hasn't been loaded, load it return this.icon; }

Those aren’t abstractions... Also, I’m not arguing that you can’t contrive an abstraction around a getter, I’m arguing that it’s useful to do so (so please spare me contrived examples!).

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#139

Post by BigJono »

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.

I get that "what don't I get?" feeling all the time. Overengineering is basically an epidemic at this point, at least in the JS/front-end industry.

My guess is there's a correlation between overengineering and career success, which drives it. Simple, 'KISS' style code is the easiest to work with, but usually involves ditching less essential libraries and sticking more to standards, which looks crap on your resume. Most interviewers are more interested in whether you can piece together whatever stack they're using rather than whether you can implement a tough bit of logic and leave great documentation for it; so from a career perspective there's zero reason for me to go for a (relatively) simple 100 line solution to a tough problem when I can instead go for a library that solves 100 different use cases and has 10k lines of documentation that future devs have to wade through. The former might be the 'best' solution for maintainability but the latter will make me appear to be a better engineer, especially to non-technical people, of which there are far too many of on the average team.

Re: Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

#140

Post by stickfigure »

tombert wrote: post #72
tootie wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

none of my coworkers use it

This sounds like the root of your problem. If you want to do FP, and none of your coworkers want to do FP, then your problem isn't really the language.

If you're in a Java shop, maybe start by evangelizing FP rather than a totally different language/platform? It's possible to do FP in Java, and (IMO) it ends up pretty reasonable. But it's not the default habit for J Random Java Programmer, so they need training.

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