The idea is good, but the wide spread implementations are rather bad.
Funny that with JavaScript a rather undervalued OOP model (prototype based) got such a spread :)
Was object-oriented programming a failure? (2015)
11–20 of 126 posts
Re: Was object-oriented programming a failure? (2015)
#12Why are there still those who think any advocate of OOP is an advocate of "OOP or Nothing! All things are Objects! All things are an instantiation of a class! All things must derive from a root class! etc."? OOP is a tool. And generally a useful one. Every new programming paradigm at its inception was going to Save The World and make programming A Better Place. Turns out, every one if these paradigms is a tool with u…
Exactly. "Everything is an object" was an extremism (today's extremism is the crusade against 'mutable state'), but otherwise OoO has been useful. For example it has seen great success in GUIs.
If you're creating final immutable everything in Java using effective Java chapter 1 immutable objects, sorry but you have the wrong language for the job. Even with Java 8 Optional and Lombok annotations, it opens a can of worms. What is optional and what are sensible defaults for non optional value? These are often non trivial questions in legacy code bases.
Re: Was object-oriented programming a failure? (2015)
#13Pure OOP programming (as Alan Kay intented) never took off in the large scale.
The good thing about these OO-inspired class based languages (C++, Java, etc) is that it has forced people to write their spaghetti code inside modules (classes) with documented interface. They also made using algebraic data types common.
Re: Was object-oriented programming a failure? (2015)
#14As somebody who works on many different OOP-projects, could somebody tell me how I should structure my software if not using OOP?
This is the basic stategy that I try to follow as much as possible:
Classes that hold data have no methods (beyond getters/setters). Classes that implement behavior have no mutable state; they exist as namespaces for the functionality that they provide.
I've been quite successful with this approach. It leads to code that is easier to understand than a big ball of stateful objects.
Re: Was object-oriented programming a failure? (2015)
#15OO has been so incredibly successful that we now take what it got us for granted as we use it every day. It's been backgrounded.
Here's what Fred Brooks (Mythical Man Month and, more pertinently No Silver Bullet) said at a panel 20 years after NSB:
A burst of papers came and said “Oh yes, there is a silver bullet, and here it is, this is mine!” When ‘96 came and I was writing the new edition of The Mythical Man-Month and did a chapter on that, there was not yet a 10 fold improvement in productivity in software engineering. I would question whether there has been any single technique that has done so since. If so, I would guess it is object oriented programming, as a matter of fact.
Re: Was object-oriented programming a failure? (2015)
#16Why are there still those who think any advocate of OOP is an advocate of "OOP or Nothing! All things are Objects! All things are an instantiation of a class! All things must derive from a root class! etc."? OOP is a tool. And generally a useful one. Every new programming paradigm at its inception was going to Save The World and make programming A Better Place. Turns out, every one if these paradigms is a tool with u…
Exactly. "Everything is an object" was an extremism (today's extremism is the crusade against 'mutable state'), but otherwise OoO has been useful. For example it has seen great success in GUIs.
I can definitely state that OOP allows to implement GUI. But "great success" I can see only for vendors selling OOP tools for GUI development.
Consider web frameworks. Given a choice I select React and similar functional frameworks than OOP based ones. They are just more productive and scale better.
Or consider QT. My colleagues with a lot of QT experience use QML to create GUI. They avoid any C++ GUI code unless it is really a must.
Re: Was object-oriented programming a failure? (2015)
#17Why are there still those who think any advocate of OOP is an advocate of "OOP or Nothing! All things are Objects! All things are an instantiation of a class! All things must derive from a root class! etc."? OOP is a tool. And generally a useful one. Every new programming paradigm at its inception was going to Save The World and make programming A Better Place. Turns out, every one if these paradigms is a tool with u…
Exactly. "Everything is an object" was an extremism (today's extremism is the crusade against 'mutable state'), but otherwise OoO has been useful. For example it has seen great success in GUIs.
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Re: Was object-oriented programming a failure? (2015)
#18The idea is good, but the wide spread implementations are rather bad. Funny that with JavaScript a rather undervalued OOP model (prototype based) got such a spread :)
Sturgeon's Law:
"Sure 90% of OO is crap. That's because 90% of everything is crap"
Re: Was object-oriented programming a failure? (2015)
#19As somebody who works on many different OOP-projects, could somebody tell me how I should structure my software if not using OOP?
Consider compression oriented programming: https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0019.html
Re: Was object-oriented programming a failure? (2015)
#20Why are there still those who think any advocate of OOP is an advocate of "OOP or Nothing! All things are Objects! All things are an instantiation of a class! All things must derive from a root class! etc."? OOP is a tool. And generally a useful one. Every new programming paradigm at its inception was going to Save The World and make programming A Better Place. Turns out, every one if these paradigms is a tool with u…
> Why are there still those who think any advocate of OOP is an advocate of "OOP or Nothing! All things are Objects! All things are an instantiation of a class! All things must derive from a root class! etc."?
Because there are many low skill, poorly-informed people who write code still believe these things. In particular that "OOP" is automatically equivalent to "better quality code." It’s a sort of cargo cultism that is present in a few places.