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Ask HN: Why do new(ish) programming languages eschew OOP features?

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Re: Ask HN: Why do new(ish) programming languages eschew OOP features?

#31

Post by blihp »

keyle wrote: post #13
jchw wrote: post #6

Inheritance makes some sense, but composition is much, much easier to understand and work with. Inheritance has well documented problems that composition does not. It’s not so much about being object oriented or not, at least not directly. I could elaborate, but others have said it better anyways. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_over_inheritance

This, 100 times. Program for enough years and you'll find composition such a breath of fresh air. But like any pattern/design, the proof is in the pudding; as in, crap code can be written in any shape or format.

I'm curious why you find it a breath of fresh air? The Wikipedia link in the post you're responding to specifically states that composition over inheritance is an OOP principle. If one needs to abandon OOP to make use of composition, was OOP actually what was being done or was it instead an exercise in creating an class-based taxonomy? (a lot of people seem to fall into this trap)

Re: Ask HN: Why do new(ish) programming languages eschew OOP features?

#33

Post by userbinator »

jchw wrote: post #6

Inheritance makes some sense, but composition is much, much easier to understand and work with. Inheritance has well documented problems that composition does not. It’s not so much about being object oriented or not, at least not directly. I could elaborate, but others have said it better anyways. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_over_inheritance

but composition is much, much easier to understand and work with.

The article you linked mentions IMHO the biggest disadvantage:

One common drawback of using composition instead of inheritance is that methods being provided by individual components may have to be implemented in the derived type, even if they are only forwarding methods

Code whose only purpose is to "appease the design" and otherwise does absolutely nothing of value is a strong-enough negative reason. It's pure bloat, overhead that gets in the way of both programmers trying to understand/debug and machines trying to execute.

Too much inheritance can lead to a "where is the method" problem, but I think that's still better than the alternative of dozens upon dozens of lines of otherwise useless code, because the former at least does not increase the amount of code that needs to be written/debugged/maintained.

Re: Ask HN: Why do new(ish) programming languages eschew OOP features?

#34

Post by keyle »

blihp wrote: post #31
keyle wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, 100 times. Program for enough years and you'll find composition such a breath of fresh air. But like any pattern/design, the proof is in the pudding; as in, crap code can be written in any shape or format.

I'm curious why you find it a breath of fresh air? The Wikipedia link in the post you're responding to specifically states that composition over inheritance is an OOP principle. If one needs to abandon OOP to make use of composition, was OOP actually what was being done or was it instead an exercise in creating an class-based taxonomy? (a lot of people seem to fall into this trap)

It's the way OOP was used from what I saw 10-20 years ago. It was all inheritance, from uni course to patterns used etc.

I've only fell into composition when I got into video game development. We saw it a bit more with Silverlight but now it's such a clear movement (composition over inheritance) that it's in my resume's motto.

Re: Ask HN: Why do new(ish) programming languages eschew OOP features?

#35

Post by runT1ME »

ajross wrote: post #5

Unpopular answer: pure fashion. There's nothing wrong with object methods (that's 100% pure syntax vs. a function call) and an implicit "this" scope for symbols (which is just a limited form of dynamic scope[1]). They don't make code hard to understand. OO can be abused to produce bad designs, of course, but that's not an indictment of its syntax. Non-syntactic aspects are maybe a more involved discussion. For an exa…

The times i've ever actually needed 'runtime' polymorphism (usually implemented w/ subtype & virtual methods) are utterly dwarfed by the times I'd been able to make use of parametric polymorphism, which I find far easier to reason about and use.

Re: Ask HN: Why do new(ish) programming languages eschew OOP features?

#36

Post by cartlidge »

I'm not sure I agree with your thesis. For instance, Javascript has recently added an OOP class syntax, and Typescript extends the result with strict types. (JS was of course in some sense object oriented beforehand, but it wasn't recognisable to most working OO programmers as OO.) Moreover, I think you need a deliberately hamstrung language to get a genuinely OOP language - C++ and Javascript are both fully capable of writing OO code, but most people shy from calling them OO languages because they're not limited. A more interesting question is whether new programs are object oriented, and I guess the answer here remains, broadly, yes. This is why Javascript got class syntax.

But I will assume you're a better observer than me, and make the following claims:

I think there's two reasons: Object-oriented style inheritance is unsound (inheritance is not subtyping), so academics don't like it. Moreover, classical OO is not composable or extensible - unless you write your own primitives in every application and end up with Java-like verbosity. Therefore, research in new features tend not to be object oriented. Therefore, new languages tend to adopt non-OOP styles.

The other reason is probably that there's enough OOP languages. The effort it takes to create a new OOP language exceeds the effort it takes to shoehorn your OOP algorithm into an existing OOP language. Therefore, there's less motivation from the engineering side.

On the other hand, there's still lots of scope for better functional style languages; that marketplace isn't exhausted yet. Rust, for instance, merges a lot of academic techniques trialled on functional languages with a systems programming architecture.

Re: Ask HN: Why do new(ish) programming languages eschew OOP features?

#37

Post by ledgerdev »

jforberg wrote: post #10

If you'd like to hear the case against OOP in modern programming, the Rich Hickey talks are a pretty good place to start: * The value of values * Simple made easy * Are we there yet? I'm on mobile, but you'll find these easily on the google.

Absolutely watch the talk "Are we there yet", it's my favorite of all time.

In short OO gets time fundamentally wrong, is unable to represent a discrete succession of values, and entangles state with operation.

OO has been ~35 year wrong turn for the software development industry.

Re: Ask HN: Why do new(ish) programming languages eschew OOP features?

#38

Post by wwright »

userbinator wrote: post #33
jchw wrote: post #6

Inheritance makes some sense, but composition is much, much easier to understand and work with. Inheritance has well documented problems that composition does not. It’s not so much about being object oriented or not, at least not directly. I could elaborate, but others have said it better anyways. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_over_inheritance

but composition is much, much easier to understand and work with. The article you linked mentions IMHO the biggest disadvantage: One common drawback of using composition instead of inheritance is that methods being provided by individual components may have to be implemented in the derived type, even if they are only forwarding methods Code whose only purpose is to "appease the design" and otherwise does absolutely n…

How often do you need to write methods just to forward to another method that _stay_ that way, and don’t evolve more logic later on? I avoid inheritance like the plague, but I feel like I don’t really write forwarding methods very often.

Re: Ask HN: Why do new(ish) programming languages eschew OOP features?

#39

Post by Slackwise »

jforberg wrote: post #10

If you'd like to hear the case against OOP in modern programming, the Rich Hickey talks are a pretty good place to start: * The value of values * Simple made easy * Are we there yet? I'm on mobile, but you'll find these easily on the google.

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Values/

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hi...

If you're going to watch any of these, at least watch "The Value of Values".

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