Joe Armstrong: Why OO Sucks
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Joe Armstrong: Why OO Sucks
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Re: Joe Armstrong: Why OO Sucks
#2A series of assertions and "I just don't see it"-s presented as self-evident when they are anything but. No examples of real cases where OO does in fact "suck", ending with the claim that in order to understand the popularity of OO one should "follow the money".
What? I mean, I don't even...
Re: Joe Armstrong: Why OO Sucks
#3A series of assertions and "I just don't see it"-s presented as self-evident when they are anything but. No examples of real cases where OO does in fact "suck", ending with the claim that in order to understand the popularity of OO one should "follow the money". What? I mean, I don't even...
harmful.cat-v.org has a lot of odd opinions:
Re: Joe Armstrong: Why OO Sucks
#4There's a certain allure to saying code should be a certain way because of natural properties of computing, or our own feelings on what things are different and similar from what other things.
The reason OO shines is because it allows you to make that distinction at the domain level rather than the code level. You organize your software into business objects, or components, and have these interact with each other. They allow you to separate it out in a way that a new developer can come to the project, understand what the code should be doing, and look for the classes which seem the like objects involved, including the types of data it has and the things it can do.
There are all sorts of nasty things we've invented in OO over the past few years (mixing up inheritance and composition, using way too much state), but it gives us a lot of advantages from an engineering point of view.
Re: Joe Armstrong: Why OO Sucks
#5“Data structure and functions should not be bound together” — I can't agree with you more.
However, in Smalltalk (and even Ruby, to some degree) objects are not data structures, they are collections of functions invokable on a 'thing' with an unknown structure. They have an internal structure—potentially immutable—but you never see this, because you only interact with methods on the object.
And in many cases, there is syntactic sugar to make invocation of these methods look like slot access: think of Objective-C’s `@property`, or Python's descriptors, or Ruby's `def method=(value)`.
When people talk about 'object-oriented languages' in such general terms I get frustrated, because there's a lot more nuance to this than simply 'bundles of functions and data structures'. That's a very implementation-led way of looking at it. The reality is that these objects are supposed to represent real-life situations where knowledge of what something is, or how it behaves, or how it fulfills its contracts is unknown. If NASA's Remote Agent[1] had been implemented in Haskell, OCaml or ML, do you think debugging DS1 would have been as simple as connecting to a REPL and changing some definitions in a living core? I don't think the image-based persistence of SmallTalk and many Lisps would be possible in a purely functional or traditional procedural language.
And what is a data type anyway? It's supposed to represent a mathematical set of possible values. Sure, you can use a simple array to build a b-tree, but don't you want to explicitly state that variable x is a b-tree if that's the case? I was always taught that explicit is better than implicit.
I should probably stop ranting now, it's just that if you’re going to start hating on programming paradigms, at least sound like you've thought your argument through a bit more.
Re: Joe Armstrong: Why OO Sucks
#6There's a certain allure to saying code should be a certain way because of natural properties of computing, or our own feelings on what things are different and similar from what other things. The reason OO shines is because it allows you to make that distinction at the domain level rather than the code level. You organize your software into business objects, or components, and have these interact with each other. Th…
Isn't that a bit of a false dilemma though? Can you not have clean interfaces and separation of concerns without OO -- even with something as 'simple' as python namespaces and dicts?
Re: Joe Armstrong: Why OO Sucks
#7There's a certain allure to saying code should be a certain way because of natural properties of computing, or our own feelings on what things are different and similar from what other things. The reason OO shines is because it allows you to make that distinction at the domain level rather than the code level. You organize your software into business objects, or components, and have these interact with each other. Th…
OO isn't the only way to implement the Actor model.
Re: Joe Armstrong: Why OO Sucks
#8I think OOP took off because it seems like a great way to model things. The idea that you can simulate a car by saying you have a base kind of car with properties and actions and then a Ferrari is a kind of car, so you can just kind of take that car object and make it have more horsepower and a different body type and you have a Ferrari, is very exciting.
Businesses like to model things and simulate things. So, in that respect, OOP was probably an easy sell because it's selling an idea of what businesses want, even if it hasn't worked out exactly as they hoped in all cases.
Re: Joe Armstrong: Why OO Sucks
#9I don't get it. If people don't like OO, why don't they just not use it. Just use your favorite methodology to get the job done. Why do they have to bad mouth it?
Re: Joe Armstrong: Why OO Sucks
#10A series of assertions and "I just don't see it"-s presented as self-evident when they are anything but. No examples of real cases where OO does in fact "suck", ending with the claim that in order to understand the popularity of OO one should "follow the money". What? I mean, I don't even...
harmful.cat-v.org has a lot of odd opinions: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/political-correctness/girls-in-CS
i'd take anything i read at cat-v.org with a grain of salt, they seem to appreciate the art of trolling: http://gofy.cat-v.org