The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated
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Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated
#2In summary, "Object Oriented Programming is good when you don't orient your program around objects."
Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated
#3In summary, "Object Oriented Programming is good when you don't orient your program around objects."
That sounds snarky. Not sure if that was intended or not, but regardless I read your comment as:
"OOP is good when you use the object oriented structure as a tool to organize your code and data to solve a problem, but not when you try to wrap your solution or your conception of the problem itself around OOP."
It's 2020, and after 50+ years of programming language research I think it's safe to say that there is no "one language to rule them all" or "one programming paradigm to rule them all." Different approaches seem to excel in different areas.
OOP seems to excel when the problem involves modeling systems with discrete parts and/or where there is a lot of state to manage. In other words I'd consider OOP for a "state-rich" problem domain. I am not saying this can only be done with OOP, just that it's a viable choice. There are multiple approaches to most problems.
I'd also say that bad code tends to develop different forms of badness under different paradigms. Bad OOP code is massively over-engineered, verbose, and slow. Bad procedural code is spaghetti. Bad functional code is impenetrable "write-only code" that can only be understood by its author (maybe). Bad code in multi-paradigm languages tends to have all these forms of badness.
Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated
#4This doesn't speak to what I consider some of the most dangerous parts of OOP, which include the assumptions that tightly binding data and code is helpful, and that statefulness is fine to freely sprinkle throughout your program.
Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated
#5This doesn't speak to what I consider some of the most dangerous parts of OOP, which include the assumptions that tightly binding data and code is helpful, and that statefulness is fine to freely sprinkle throughout your program.
Agreed. The biggest problem with OOPS lies in its original premise: that code and data should be the same thing!
This is grevious error, IMHO, that leads to nothing but problems: endless boilerplate code, lots of "interfaces" that essentially do nothing (that couldn't be done directly with said data), and debugging nightmares.
I much prefer to work with systems where code and data are separate and never the twain shall meet.
Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated
#6Object-Oriented Programming is Bad (2016)
Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated
#7There is no 'case' to be made against any paradigm. Different hats for different jobs.
Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated
#8The author is right about ORMs. They are ridiculously over engineered solutions. (My experience is largely with Django and SQLAlchemy ORMs)
As soon as you want to do something that's not already perfectly built in, everything becomes a mess of impenetrable hacks. Autogenerated Django migrations are unstable and often need to be edited to to be correct or make any damn sense.
It also encourages to people to blur or just straight up stomp on the line between ORM objects - tightly coupled to your database - and business-logic objects (entities, usecases, whatever). It's the Django recommended approach, called "fat models" and it leads to ridiculous levels of coupling and impenetrable ball-of-mud code.
Just write SQL and marshal it into business objects. I'm actually quite fond of doing this with the SQLAlchemy Table & Query APIs, they do most of the marshaling for you.
In Go I just write the raw SQL.
More generally regarding OOP: I have never seen any good come from more than one layer of inheritance.
Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated
#9Article doesn't even make an argument. If you're not modelling things with objects, and you're not using inheritance, in what sense are you doing OOP at all?
If you want to treat OOP as a tool to use when it's appropriate to the problem, good - but as you gain experience you'll find that that actually just means "never".
Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated
#10IMHO if a programming philosophy leaves so much room for interpretation and misunderstanding, rants and counter-rants, needs evangelizing to the "dumb masses" what it "actually" means, and all of that hasn't been settled after more than half a century, then it has turned from a philosophy into a religion (or rather, a cult).
Just let it rest and move on. It's just a waste of time for everyone involved.