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The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated

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Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated

#31

Post by Rickasaurus »

clktmr wrote: post #27

> The solution to the fragile base class problem and other inheritance hangovers is surprisingly simple — don’t use it If OOP provides the footgun to shoot yourself, OOP is at fault. Overall the article reads as "OOP has no problems if is used correctly". Of course that's true. I have seen well designed OOP programs, but the majority was not. The author should ask the question, why OOP is applied the wrong way so oft…

The term we like to use is "the pit of success". It shouldn't be hard to do it the right way.

Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated

#32

Post by bussierem »

The problem I've always had with these back-and-forths between various programming philosophies is that the very nature of the argument exposes the reason the arguments don't work.

The most common (but not only) way each side argues its point is to take some contrived example and show how philosophy X does it well, and how philosophy Y does it terribly. These examples are often ranted about by the "Y" proponents because "it's a bad problem choice designed to make Y look bad".

Yes. It is. Because X and Y were not designed to solve the same problems. If you pick an example Y is good at, most of the time X will be bad at it. So if you're doing something like that, use Y. But if you're doing something X is good at, then pick X

Why would you intentionally shoot yourself in the foot to use a framework, language, philosophy, etc. that was never intended to be used for that thing when there's something that was? Stop arguing about who's better at what. X and Y are good at different things. That's why they're _different philosophies/languages/technologies_.

Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated

#33

Post by gcpwnd »

As usual. People have criticism. Counter critics say get smarter. The problem is that we are dealing with largely unproven concepts. We have no facts, not even meaningful empiric insights. It is a battle of religions but it should be an academic challenge.

Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated

#34

Post by PaulHoule »

tempodox wrote: post #18

IMO, OOP just puts too many footguns at your disposal, the most dangerous one being mutability (how normal is it that our methods mutate instance variables?). The larger a system grows the more mutability will make it even harder to understand and control. It may be tolerable in small-scale embedded software, but outside of that we should make use of the better alternatives that modern hardware affords us.

I knew a professor who worked on Density Functional Theory which can be used to derive many of the properties of materials from first principles. (e.g. "Does Iron Conduct Electricity?")

This involved running FORTRAN programs on what was then considered a large supercomputer (256 nodes.) Asked what he thought about any programming technique that cost a factor of 2 in performance and he told me it was a non-starter when he ran jobs that took a month.

Back when Hadoop was popular, the "cutting edge" of the thing was the system that deserialized and serialized data and some of the major ways to improve performance are: eliminating copies, eliminating memory allocations, etc.

I told Rich Hickey the same thing I was told, that even though the performance difference isn't much in the grand scheme of things, people who have high performance needs are going to dismiss whatever he brings to the table if it costs them a factor of two.

Interestingly, Hickey responded the same way the professor did: just as the professor dismissed the value of the 2x slower but more maintainable system, Hickey just seemed to dismiss the value of "2x faster".

I see this a lot where people just don't communicate, even when they pretend they are.

Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated

#35

Post by throwaway894345 »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #11
mimixco wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sha…

OOPs original premise is homoiconicity? Really?

I'm not sure "code is data" necessarily means "homoiconicity", but it could mean "first-class functions" (or at least that's what I think of when I hear the phrase; maybe I'm wrong); however, I'm not familiar with anyone who argues that these are fundamental OOP features (perhaps Smalltalk had first class functions, but for a very long time the most popular flavors of OOP did not).

Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated

#37

Post by dnautics »

skrtskrt wrote: post #23
dnautics wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always prescribing raw sql is dangerous: You typically want something managing your sql queries if there's user input because scrubbing out SQL injections is hard and it's not something you should be 'rolling your own'

Yes, I'm really talking about using libraries that let you pass parameters into a statement, and have some level of protection against injection.

I was just reacting to this, which is confusing given your response.

> In Go I just write the raw SQL.

But in general I agree with you about ORMs (I do not use them). I'm just pointing out that when the easiest/most popular library to reach for to protect yourself against injection is an ORM, it's understandable to use it.

Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated

#38

Post by freedomben »

Might I suggest, when posting Medium premium stories to Hacker News it would be best to use the "Share Friend Link" link so people can avoid the pay wall (it doesn't affect author earnings). That seems to be what it is for: promotion outside of Medium itself. (This only works for the author so doesn't help others, but I wanted to mention it to raise awareness)

Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated

#39

Post by infogulch »

Rickasaurus wrote: post #31
clktmr wrote: post #27

> The solution to the fragile base class problem and other inheritance hangovers is surprisingly simple — don’t use it If OOP provides the footgun to shoot yourself, OOP is at fault. Overall the article reads as "OOP has no problems if is used correctly". Of course that's true. I have seen well designed OOP programs, but the majority was not. The author should ask the question, why OOP is applied the wrong way so oft…

The term we like to use is "the pit of success". It shouldn't be hard to do it the right way.

You are a ball. Do you want to naturally roll towards the pit of success, or struggle to balance yourself atop the tower of abstractions?

Re: The Case Against OOP Is Wildly Overstated

#40

Post by bussierem »

xtian wrote: post #24
bussierem wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's telling that I'm not able to tell whether you're talking about OOP or FP in this comment.

Is there controversy about what FP “actually means”?

in as much as there is controversy about what OOP means, yes -- OOP has an established definition, same as FP. The argument about "what it means" comes from the arguments between OOP and other philosophies. People often will purposefully (or accidentally) misrepresent "what it means" to strengthen their own point (or through misunderstanding of the topic). The same happens with FP compared to other philosophies.

[EDIT]: To clarify I am not advocating for one or the other. I made another post in this thread talking about this a bit. GP's comment is able to be applied to basically any technology, language, or philosophy. OOP and FP are just the two "heavyweights" in this.

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