Java 9 features announced

It at least buys you a way of organizing your code that makes it easier to understand not just for yourself, but other programmers who read it in the future. Creating objects and using data types isn't really mutually exclusive, you use both as needed.

> OOP does not mean "all methods are defined within the class declaration/file" a la Java, plenty of OOPLs allow external method definition. So it doesn't mean "well in OOP I always know the behavior of my class" when you have friend functions etc.

This is true. The main benefit of OOP in this regard is to help see the interactions between related groups of functions as organized into objects.

> OOP might mean "abstract classes" ie virtual methods. This leads us to inheritance, which is a) not confined to OOP and b) widely criticized. Remember that inheritance != polymorphism, c.f. Visual Basic for instance (at least VB5. Showing my age...). In practice, OOP usually invokes a great-chain-of-being-like hierarchy descending from Object, but again this is not universal.

Inheritance definitely has downsides and should be considered carefully when used, but it also has valid use cases. As with any language feature, it really is more of a question of is this useful to fix the problem I'm trying to solve? Granted, a lot of programmers (at least from the code I've worked on) seem to see inheritance as a universal hammer to their current problem nail :)

> OOP generally means "polymorphism", but the mechanisms vary widely. OOP's "Classic" inheritance-driven polymorphism is probably the worst way to do it, good for quick code-reuse and that's about it. "Interfaces"/pure virtual classes are a design pattern on top of abstract classes, better expressed as mixins or type-classes.

Whether mixins, type-classes, or a polymorphic inheritance is the right choice really depends on language and problem space. At least with mixins there are definitely circumstances where a mixin could have so many methods that it is essentially a form of multiple inheritance. Again, knowing the right tool for the job and knowing what limitations your development language has is more important than the existence of any one feature or tool.

> OOP generally implies strong typing but not always (python). OOP typing is quite clunky, especially in "noun-oriented" Java. You can make an argument that the rise of DI frameworks is in response to having impoverished type systems.

I'm not sure about DI being the result of impoverished type systems. Generally DI is about insuring that function dependencies are explicitly consumed rather than implicitly existing somewhere as a more global state. DI is more about contract enforcement on functions than anything else.

> My semi-rant here is because people say things like "do it this way, it's good OOP" without there being any agreement about whether we're discussing polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation, factoring, normalization, or design patterns that are largely a response to the confusion.

This is definitely the crux of it. "Good OOP" is a meaningless phrase for the most part. What exactly is good for a project? Given the amount of tools available in OO languages, many different approaches could be used that would function as good based on your particular problem and developers.

How do you account for value objects in that statement? Are you saying there should be no such thing?

My somewhat unorthodox rules for writing Java:

1. Don't use private. No reason to restrict yourself or others, and do extra typing. Friendly is a perfectly good default.

2. Don't use reflection. Reflection is only useful for making frameworks. Frameworks don't reduce the complexity of the problem you're trying to solve. Don't use them.

3. Don't use getters/setters. Sometimes they make sense for updating a cached value, or using a different underlying representation, but in general it's unnecessary clutter. If you still want them (e.g., for code style reasons), just generate them.

4. Don't use other people's code (tongue-in-cheek). If you use third-party libraries, consider wrapping them in your own interfaces as needed. This makes it easy to change the implementation and perform tests. It's not much effort, since you'll rarely use more than a limited subset of the functionality offered by the library. If you need a large subset, then just use the library directly.

5. Use final. Immutability makes programs simpler, more efficient, and inherently thread-safe.

6. Consider writing bean classes as follows. It's simple, efficient, thread-safe, and has a clean syntax (item.name):

    public class Item {
        public final int id;
        public final String name;

        public Item(int id, String name) {
            this.id = id;
            this.name = name;
        }
    }

8. Keep improving the way you write your code, don't listen to the crowd.