13 ms·

All evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013)

70 points by bontoJR 11y ago

JumpJumpJump 11y ago
With billions and billions of wealth created by SaaS companies that base their platforms and websites on OOP.
- max-a 11y ago
  >With billions and billions of wealth created by SaaS companies that base their platforms and websites on software. FTFY
  - JumpJumpJump 11y ago
    Your data points may differ, but eBay makes profits of 1B on mainly a Java platform. Other large companies use Ruby, PHP, Python and Java which all are based on OOP. But I would be interested in your arguments.
sedlich 11y ago
What probably scares me most is, that managers think OO is in general a wonderful best practice you need to have in the company...
- PythonicAlpha 11y ago
  Managers who think, there is a silver bullet, always scare me!
  - jbnicolai 11y ago
    So close to haiku, only one more syllable, great embarrassment.
  - Retr0spectrum 11y ago
    Your use of commas has changed the meaning of your sentence. They look like parenthetical commas [0] to me, so the sentence reads as "Managers who think (there is a silver bullet) always scare me!". [0] http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tutorial/page_06.htm http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tuto...
    - PythonicAlpha 11y ago
      Thank you. I am sorry, I am no native speaker! Unfortunately, I can not change the post any more.
- userbinator 11y ago
  What scares me more are managers who think dogmatic adherence to "best practices" is the only way to be successful.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    I'm more scared of those mandating dogmatic adherence on a best practice they don't understand. cough <agile> cough
- mtrn 11y ago
  This is a very general problem. As a organizational unit, you need to follow a path, but if it is difficult to determine the source of your problems in the first place, many things will sound like solutions.
bhaak 11y ago
> Extremist languages like Java force you to think of everything in terms of objects. Erm, Java is by far not the most OO programming language there is. For example, primitive types are not objects (no, auto-boxing doesn't make them objects). > But is Object Orientation (OO) a good idea? Probably as good as any other programming paradigma out there. > Does it have problems? Sure, like every other language as well. > Is it the right tool for everything? No, like every other language isn't as well. > Let’s explore some of these questions in a slightly tongue in cheek and cathartic rant. And here I stopped reading. If you need to rant, do it over coffee and don't waste my time when even your introduction is not witty enough to keep my interest.
- pvdebbe 11y ago
  I think Java can be classified as an "extremist OOP" language because it doesn't really support self-standing functions.
- Loque 11y ago
  My sentiments exactly, kinda surprised this title made it so high up! OOP has some fantastic applications and may have been oversold to the author for a project he worked on. OOP(s)!
  - sklogic 11y ago
    > OOP has some fantastic applications Yes, OOP is great for agent-based simulations. Only. This is a fantastic, exciting area, but it is extremely niche and tiny. Anywhere else, OOP is nothing but an obstacle.
    - tim333 11y ago
      It's kind handy for using other peoples code. Like if you want a couple of Google maps on your page you can create a couple of map objects and set their location, colouring, add and remove markers etc. I'm not sure how you'd do that neatly without objects. Beyond that I'm happy without it.
PythonicAlpha 11y ago
"All evidence" seems to me a real gross overstatement here. The author collected some topics, where he means that OOP is bad and sticks some (partly related) statements of other people to it and wants to convince with that, even when he makes some valid points here [1]. I do not buy that. The reality is, that when OOP is correctly executed (and there is the real culprit, since few people have really understand it!) it really can help you to lower the complexity of programs -- and that is decisive, not some halve-religious statements. [1] One example: Inheritance vs. Composition -- even OOP people have seen the problem that overuse of inheritance is bad. But they don't throw the whole thing out of the window, but tell where to use it or restrict its usage. Don't just find the problems and fanatically throw all (even the good stuff) out of the window!
- sklogic 11y ago
  > it really can help you to lower the complexity of programs Yet to be proven. I never seen a single example of OOP bringing anything but more unnecessary complexity.
  - PythonicAlpha 11y ago
    Than you might not have seen good OOP designs. My experience is different -- when you really apply good OOP design to software, you can reduce complexity and come to a clearer overall design. But of course the typical 5 day Java or C++ course will not get you there. You must learn to think in OOP -- and that is a process that might take years.
    - sklogic 11y ago
      Could you please point to a classic example of a good OOP design, where it is clear that OOP made it simpler.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
d--b 11y ago
Can someone make a chrome extension to filter out the OOP vs FP articles on hacker news? I mean, how many more articles do we need? Is there anything new? Yes, FP is cleaner. Yes, OOP is useful for things like plugins. Yes, favor composition over inheritance. Yes, FP is impossible to read. Yes, immutability has its limits. Yes, Yes, Yes. Enough already.
- merb 11y ago
  Even FP needs some mutability when it comes to databases and user input. let's consider a website you would need io -> handler -> database so the io and the database is a mutable connection between the handler that by itself could be fully mutable. Mostly I think most problems of OOP and FP are solved by Reactive Streams since they encourage small units and each unit could be either programmed with OOP or with a Functional Style. This solves a lot of things. Btw. I'm mostly writing Scala and I love it, still I use some Objects or sometimes use Java. Golang or other stuff. It mostly depends what I'm doing.
- brudgers 11y ago
  The filter exists. It is community + flag. It works in all browsers.
radu_floricica 11y ago
Depends on how you use it, of course. Libraries make wonderful showcases for OOP strengths - I always like to give Java Collections as an example. But if you actually build your application code as OOP... well, I might privately think you deserve everything that happens to you because of that. I think education carries most of the guilt for this. The typical examples given in OOS classes are stuff like Car is an ancestor of Truck and SportsCar. Which led to Beans and Entreprise Java. You never want this kind of shit with your data. Much better to use plain old maps to carry content the way God intended, and to put your effort in creating flexible and reusable methods.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  This example looks bad to me -- shouldn't it be that car, truck and sports car have (at most) a common vehicle superclass?
- sz4kerto 11y ago
  > But if you actually build your application code as OOP > Beans and Entreprise Java I don't know. Netflix is built on Java, using OOP. It works well for them. Windows is built on OOP, quite a big application and works. J2EE has its problems, but it also gives you a lot of functionality. Reusing methods is nice, but developers on projects with very complex business rules (does not equal simple, but large scale projects!) don't worry that much about flexible methods as they're experienced enough. Distributed transactions, session replication, etc. are slightly more important. J2EE gives you all that by default. (And I really don't like EJBs and this kind of stuff, but don't mix up two very different levels of problems.)
  - radu_floricica 11y ago
    > J2EE has its problems, but it also gives you a lot of functionality I did have that in the back of my head when I wrote the comment. And speaking of, I'm also aware that OOP was very popular, and I don't feel completely comfortable when I criticize successful stuff - it must have worked for a reason. But still, that's as far as my brain can take me by itself: OOP should be used sparingly and EJB should not exist. (For the record I code mostly in Java, though as lisp-like as I can)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
baxter001 11y ago
Wow, so many people commenting in the thread below that article seem to have swallowed tiny uncle bobs.
chmike 11y ago
This argumentation is compilation of unjustified and demonstrated claims. It really doesn't help in understanding the author's point.
malux85 11y ago
"All evidence" https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
radu_floricica 11y ago
> Probably as good as any other programming paradigma out there. I take offence with postmodern relativism. Not every paradigm is created equal (and for the record, black culture is less "good" than white culture. Come on, "acting white" because you have good grades?). The way to get better as a professional is to analyze various ways of doing stuff and find which is better and how much of it you can use. This article does exactly that.
- hahainternet 11y ago
  Jesus christ you really destroyed any chance anyone had of taking your point seriously by just throwing in some racism.
  - radu_floricica 11y ago
    I'm a misogynist as well. How does that affect my argument? That's the point of throwing in a controversial example: no matter how you feel about an issue, reality is still out there, with hard edges and sharp points. If you ignore it and go the "everything is just as good"-way, you suffer. You may feel good about yourself, but you still do worse.
    - hahainternet 11y ago
      > I'm a misogynist as well. How does that affect my argument? It makes me concerned that if I agree with it, I am doing so because of equally faulty logic that has led you to believe racist and sexist claims should not be judged harshly.
    - zamalek 11y ago
      > How does that affect my argument? It's irrelevant to the discussion, so: no. Both add nothing to the topic of the discussion and are thus completely worthless opinions within this context. You can be whatever you like, but your prejudices have nothing to do with OOP - leave them out of this discussion please.
    - brudgers 11y ago
billsix 11y ago
I found it ironic that he used a quote from Alan Kay to attempt further his point that "object-oriented programming is bullshit"
- dang 11y ago
  Yes, and the 'quote' from Dijkstra, who would certainly have known about OO's Norwegian roots, sounds bogus as well. Wikiquote lists it as unsourced. A bit of Googling yields no source for the alleged Alan Kay quote either.
chmike 11y ago
This argumentation is a compilation of unjustified and demonstrated claims. It really doesn't help in understanding the author's point.
anta40 11y ago
Wonder why the author doesn't mention Smalltalk. Or Ruby...
mtrn 11y ago
Zed Shaw talked about experiences teaching programming in this LXTHW series. I cannot cite the exact source right now, but in essence he said, that novices grasp all concepts up to OOP, where there is no more analogy in computer architecture and people seem to get stuck.
dmvaldman 11y ago
[Shameless plug] For a philosophical interpretation on the differences between OOP and FP, you may enjoy my gist: Descartes, Berkeley and Functional Reactive Programming https://gist.github.com/dmvaldman/f957dd9a8ed3f6edf35d https://gist.github.com/dmvaldman/f957dd9a8ed3f6edf35d
- n0us 11y ago
  It's actually a common misquote of Descartes to say "I think therefore I am." A more proper translation is "I think, I am" which has significant implications for his philosophy.
  - irremediable 11y ago
    As I understand it, this isn't a misquote/mistranslation at all. He said "I think, I am" and "I think therefore I am" in different works exploring the same topics, without a lot of distinction between them.
  - chucksmash 11y ago
    It is not a misquotation. In Meditations on First Philosophy what he says translates to "I think, I am" but he'd used "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) in previous works. Subtlely different meanings to be parsed...
JupiterMoon 11y ago
Humanity has to accept that half of any population (including the team in our current workplace) is less intelligent than the other half. Then when we address a problem we have to accept that both halves will have to touch the problem at some stage in a project. Following this we need to aim for simplicity rather than complexity. With this in mind I think that both FP and OOP can be used to build simpler programs but that OOP has in the past failed in doing this. Basically I think we need to use tooling (in which I include languages and paradigms) that aim to come with less foot-guns and more safety rails.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  Just wondering why people don't like this post? Anyone care to explain why I'm wrong or maybe discuss?
MrDosu 11y ago
I agree with Carmack on: "'good C++' is better than 'good C'" OOP has some brilliant patterns. It is also very hard to do correctly.
- sklogic 11y ago
  Good C++ is a generic C++. And generic programming is incompatible with OOP. Those who do not agree with this statement should stop using STL.
danmaz74 11y ago
Does anybody know of any language that supports OO, but that lets you declare pure functions/methods - enforcing that those pure functions/methods only use other pure functions, don't use global objects, etc? Lately we're adopting Redux [1] together with React and the idea of being able to mix functional and OO in a better way looks more and more interesting to me. [1] https://github.com/rackt/redux https://github.com/rackt/redux
- bitJericho 11y ago
  Don't you need both in a language that supports both? I use a language that offers both but I only use methods.
- AlexeyBrin 11y ago
  Does anybody know of any language that supports OO, but that lets you declare pure functions/methods - enforcing that those pure functions/methods only use other pure functions, don't use global objects, etc? Well, turns out that one of the oldest programming languages in existence, Fortran lets you do OOP, it also has pure functions and subroutines. I'm talking about about Fortran 95/2003/2008: http://h21007.www2.hp.com/portal/download/files/unprot/fortran/docs/lrm/lrm0157.htm http://h21007.www2.hp.com/portal/download/files/unprot/fortr...
  - danmaz74 11y ago
    I would never have guessed. I wonder why this didn't spread more - it looks like a great way to mix FP and OOP.
- DanWaterworth 11y ago
  I'm actually working on such a language [1]. It's OOP, but it makes a division between 'doing objects' (services) and 'being objects' (values). It's coming along, but it's still missing many vital things. It wasn't inspired by, but bares a striking resemblance to, the noop language [2]. [1] https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/plastic https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/plastic [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noop https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noop
nailer 11y ago
I appreciate there's something I'm missing, but: I use closures to hold state all the time in node, I still don't understand why state in a closure is better than state in an object. If someone could explain this I'd be grateful: articles like this just seem to say 'state is bad' and ignore that it still exists in functional scopes.
- pvdebbe 11y ago
  It's not really state if it's immutable. Not the case with node, but closures in general match the notion of parameterized functions (like f_a(x)).
- seabee 11y ago
  State in a closure is equally as bad as state in an object. The difference is FP gives you ways to manage and isolate state that simply don't exist in OOP.
  - deleted 11y ago
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- deleted 11y ago
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nly 11y ago
Seems as good a thread as any to drop this Bjarne Stroustrup - Object Oriented Programming without Inheritance - ECOOP 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcpSLRpOMJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcpSLRpOMJM
hacker_9 11y ago
Compare the DirectX XNA OOP library to the OpenGL procedural library, and you will quickly see that when OOP is done right it makes code fun and easy to work with again. In my my mind OOP is the next logical step after procedural programming (simply packaging up a set of procedures into an object, and adding a few new ideas like inheritance and so on). Functional programming though is not the next logical step; it is a total paradigm shift. The main argument is that you get rid of state etc which means you can parallelize better - but why are no cutting edge games made in an FP language I wonder? Surely they would want to distribute all the physics collision rendering and so on to multiple cores? It's because functional programming as a separate language makes no sense, you lose too much. But incorporating FP style into OOP languages (such as with the new C++ constexpr, C# linq, and Java lambda), and giving the programmer the choice to use it when it makes sense is a far more powerful option.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  OOP is about information hiding and providing well defined state transitions. objects are used to hold a state and to act as gateway for valid transitions. most complaints I see come from people using OO programming languages badly, leaking abstractions all over the place and making it so you have to mentally take care of the state of everything instead of trusting your objects to take care of themselves, and thus you get the worst of both world: rigidity coupled with complexity I need information hiding because my brain is only so big, so I cannot possibly have in mind the whole application state and all it's permutation at all time while programming. functional languages work similarly in a sense: you avoid thinking about state transitions because the only things you have to take care of is each function input and output in a broader sense, programming becomes way way simpler if you think of your functions as having 4 well defined input output: the inputs, the return values, data from a persistent store and a state. And with experience you start noticing that it is much much more simple and productive if in any of your method at a given time you only reduce the 4 io ports in 2: on one side you have functional languages, only ever working with inputs and returns, on the other you have OO languages, which focus so much on the input, state and state, return couples. mastering the ability of using both styles where appropriate is the key here. but people get dragged into name specific too much, forgetting that these pattern emerged from coding and not the other way around.
randomsearch 11y ago
A little off-topic, but do people think that mainstream software development will ever be mainly functional, or more likely to be an OO-Functional hybrid like OCaml, Scala, or F#? Just wondering what to learn next.
xamuel 11y ago
The best way to see through language paradigm war propaganda is to look at pseudocode. Scientists, mathematicians, logicians write tons of pseudocode and it's almost entirely procedural.
- sklogic 11y ago
  Exactly. It is never anywhere near anything OOP. More verbs, less nouns.
- AnonymousPlanet 11y ago
  As one of those people who have used pseudocode in papers, I have to disagree. In a scientific paper, you describe what you have in mind using mathematical definitions. This makes it easier to reason about (proofs) and to describe it in an unambiguous way to other people (papers). Pseudocode is used to describe an algorithm following those mathematical definitions. In your paper, you might use sets. A set is defined by what it contains or does not contain. Never by how the elements found their way into the set. Including that kind of implementation detail is considered bad form (cf. forest and trees). If you wish to implement it using purely procedural code, FP, or OOP is up to you. Don't think scientists shun any kind of method just because they rarely talk about it. And for the record, I remember a number of papers that used pseudocode that could have been directly translated to working code using an OOP paradigm.
  - xamuel 11y ago
    The algorithm might take set(s) as input, sure. If that's inherently OOP then C structs are OOP. In any case, what actually happens to those sets once they're declared, will probably be procedural. "Let I be the intersection of A and B." "Let Restriction be those elements of S which are positive." Etc. You'll rarely ever see factories, managers, private variables, explicit inheritance, or any other flagship OO mechanisms in pseudocode.
    - AnonymousPlanet 11y ago
      > You'll rarely ever see factories, managers, private variables, explicit inheritance, or any other flagship OO mechanisms in pseudocode. Because they are implementation details that have no place in pseudocode. Their absence there does not say anything about their usefulness in general. You can't point at some observation about pseudocode and say "See, they don't use it so it must be rubbish." Exceptions, handling of error variables, monads, unsigned ints are also absent from typical pseudocode (unless the context is about those concepts). Does that make them useless concepts aswell?
stonemetal 11y ago
For an article with evidence in the title, it is sorely lacking. Pretty words are proof of nothing.
gutnor 11y ago
This article is just pointing at the flaws, not really offering any alternative. It is just as GP said, a rant better kept for the water cooler area. You can guess that functional programming is going to be his response I suppose considering this page is the second part of a functional programming article. (the first part being missing) If you want to analyse, you would need to also talk about what OOP is good at and how that translate in whatever other paradigm. This article only concludes with a "I do think it is a valuable mechanism for developing software", but there is absolutely no backing for that statement anywhere in the article. I tend to agree with GP. At the end of the day, for general programming, any paradigm is going to end up producing similar quality of code. Developer competence, motivation and budget are going to be #1 factors that determine code quality. Google, OSS, Modern IDE, Engineering practices like Continuous Integration/Deployment, TDD/BDD are all having a much bigger impact on the code quality than the specific languages or paradigms.
- radu_floricica 11y ago
  > At the end of the day, for general programming, any paradigm is going to end up producing similar quality of code. Developer competence I'd say that "pure" paradigms tend to be almost equally bad (tried functional programming in production code, wasn't all it's advertised to be). But this actually leaves you with more freedom, because you have to pick pieces and create your own style. So it turns out to be more important, not less, that you understand the how and why of each paradigm. As for how good this particular article was - well, I agree with the premise and it gives links to sources. May not be the Mona Lisa of articles, but it got my upvote. I'm not a regular HN reader so it's the first article on this topic I've seen in a while.
- excepttheweasel 11y ago
  Author here, FWIW this article was one of many posts some colleagues and I wrote at Pivotal during a "blog writing tontine" to encourage us all to write more and develop our skills, written hastily and intended to be part of a series I didn't finish before leaving. My intention was to point readers to some of the good ideas that were emerging (more accurately: had emerged some time ago) from alternative paradigms and how they could be used to make OOP programs better. Agreed that its certainly more about the team than what syntax you use to push bytes around, but tools do matter.
anon4 11y ago
To me, as a C++ programmer, none of this really matters. I'm working on a very compute-intensive program with a lot of modules, used in professional settings. It has to go fast. If using C++ means we can go faster than someone using whatever else, at the expense of needing five times the people and six times the development effort, we'll pick C++. We're interested in the maximum performance achievable with the language, not the average use-case. Someone would ask "why not assembly/plain C/Fortran/etc.". The answer is that C++ gives you a lot of good ways to structure your code semantically, while still letting you produce tight machine code. That's the real kicker here - I need to reason about my program as an engineering construct running on real hardware, not as an expression of Computer Science algorithms. In a nutshell, for a new programming language to be a viable way to build our core product, it has to 1. Go Fast and let us Go Faster Than Everyone Else, preferably letting me write platform-specific assembly when I need to 2. Interoperate with C++ I've seen a few recent languages attempt to cover 1., e.g. Go, Rust, Julia, for some use cases. However, I have never seen a language attempt to tackle 2. Not even for the case when you have vanilla classes with virtual functions and a few sane templates.
- tadlan 11y ago
  Check out Julia ' s Cxx.jl. it's probably the best c++ FFI in any language. You can even evaluation and call cpp code on the fly from the repl
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  D does some attempt at 2.
- godDLL 11y ago
  Wait, is there a common ABI for C++? I genuinely don't know.
zamalek 11y ago
OOP, as defined as a set of principles, is a complete load of horse shit. There are many more reasons other than what the article states as to why it doesn't deal with realities of software (e.g. data oriented programming solves some of them). OOP principles are likely one of the reasons it takes so long to train fresh-out-of-college employees, as they first need to learn how to forget that utter bullshit. However, that does not mean that OOP languages are a bust. It is only the OOP principles that are a problem. So far my experience goes, I've learned to mostly stop creating analogues of real-world things (as OOP principles would have it), except where it makes sense to, and instead use OOP features to create distinct responsibilities. Turns out OOP languages are identical to, let's say, "responsibility oriented programming" languages. OOP languages can also be used for other things, as previously mentioned: data oriented programming. DOP is used widely in gamedev. Gamedev also happens to be an industry that heavily uses an OOP language: C++. Hate the principles, not the languages. There's a big difference.
- lunz 11y ago
  > stop creating analogues of real-world things I agree. Almost everything useful around us is the product of ideas with our needs in mind, there was no TV and TV remote control in nature, no vacuum cleaner, clothes, watches... if ever, nature inspired us. We create artitifical things that make us more efficient and effective than it would be by just dealing with raw stones and sticks as they are found in nature. When it comes to today OOP we have to deal with stones and sticks again instead of thinking about a new aritifical thing that directly satisfies our needs (you call it 'responsibility').
  - zamalek 11y ago
    > you call it 'responsibility' That was simply the closest word I could come up with. You've described what I was trying to say in significantly more detail (thanks!).
Delmania 11y ago
As a comment indicates, all evidence points to this article being a load of bullshit. There's not a single concrete example in it that proves anything of the author's claim. To counter, I think this will do nicely: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/07/31/the-success-of-oop/ http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/07/31/the-success-of-oop/
k__ 11y ago
I really like many points of FP. I like to stick to immutability, map-reduce and expecially Redux. But after I saw a comparison of OOP and FP [0] I had to laugh a bit. What about monads and category theory? I also didn't fully grasp FRP with all its streams and lifting. [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CNPKc6xU8AApYPy.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CNPKc6xU8AApYPy.jpg
asgard1024 11y ago
I believe OOP gained such a foothold in programming world because it was (and still is) very useful for building GUIs on the PC. Since PCs have taken over the world, so had the OOP. But in other areas the OOP model is questionable. For example, you have transaction processing applications that have been built for years on mainframes with different models.
armitron 11y ago
Entirely content-free bullshit article.

70 points by bontoJR 11y ago

JumpJumpJump 11y ago

With billions and billions of wealth created by SaaS companies that base their platforms and websites on OOP.

max-a 11y ago
>With billions and billions of wealth created by SaaS companies that base their platforms and websites on software. FTFY
- JumpJumpJump 11y ago
  Your data points may differ, but eBay makes profits of 1B on mainly a Java platform. Other large companies use Ruby, PHP, Python and Java which all are based on OOP. But I would be interested in your arguments.

sedlich 11y ago

What probably scares me most is, that managers think OO is in general a wonderful best practice you need to have in the company...

PythonicAlpha 11y ago
Managers who think, there is a silver bullet, always scare me!
- jbnicolai 11y ago
  So close to haiku, only one more syllable, great embarrassment.
- Retr0spectrum 11y ago
  Your use of commas has changed the meaning of your sentence. They look like parenthetical commas [0] to me, so the sentence reads as "Managers who think (there is a silver bullet) always scare me!". [0] http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tutorial/page_06.htm http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tuto...
  - PythonicAlpha 11y ago
    Thank you. I am sorry, I am no native speaker! Unfortunately, I can not change the post any more.
userbinator 11y ago
What scares me more are managers who think dogmatic adherence to "best practices" is the only way to be successful.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  I'm more scared of those mandating dogmatic adherence on a best practice they don't understand. cough <agile> cough
mtrn 11y ago
This is a very general problem. As a organizational unit, you need to follow a path, but if it is difficult to determine the source of your problems in the first place, many things will sound like solutions.

bhaak 11y ago

> Extremist languages like Java force you to think of everything in terms of objects. Erm, Java is by far not the most OO programming language there is. For example, primitive types are not objects (no, auto-boxing doesn't make them objects). > But is Object Orientation (OO) a good idea? Probably as good as any other programming paradigma out there. > Does it have problems? Sure, like every other language as well. > Is it the right tool for everything? No, like every other language isn't as well. > Let’s explore some of these questions in a slightly tongue in cheek and cathartic rant. And here I stopped reading. If you need to rant, do it over coffee and don't waste my time when even your introduction is not witty enough to keep my interest.

pvdebbe 11y ago
I think Java can be classified as an "extremist OOP" language because it doesn't really support self-standing functions.
Loque 11y ago
My sentiments exactly, kinda surprised this title made it so high up! OOP has some fantastic applications and may have been oversold to the author for a project he worked on. OOP(s)!
- sklogic 11y ago
  > OOP has some fantastic applications Yes, OOP is great for agent-based simulations. Only. This is a fantastic, exciting area, but it is extremely niche and tiny. Anywhere else, OOP is nothing but an obstacle.
  - tim333 11y ago
    It's kind handy for using other peoples code. Like if you want a couple of Google maps on your page you can create a couple of map objects and set their location, colouring, add and remove markers etc. I'm not sure how you'd do that neatly without objects. Beyond that I'm happy without it.

PythonicAlpha 11y ago

"All evidence" seems to me a real gross overstatement here. The author collected some topics, where he means that OOP is bad and sticks some (partly related) statements of other people to it and wants to convince with that, even when he makes some valid points here [1]. I do not buy that. The reality is, that when OOP is correctly executed (and there is the real culprit, since few people have really understand it!) it really can help you to lower the complexity of programs -- and that is decisive, not some halve-religious statements. [1] One example: Inheritance vs. Composition -- even OOP people have seen the problem that overuse of inheritance is bad. But they don't throw the whole thing out of the window, but tell where to use it or restrict its usage. Don't just find the problems and fanatically throw all (even the good stuff) out of the window!

sklogic 11y ago
> it really can help you to lower the complexity of programs Yet to be proven. I never seen a single example of OOP bringing anything but more unnecessary complexity.
- PythonicAlpha 11y ago
  Than you might not have seen good OOP designs. My experience is different -- when you really apply good OOP design to software, you can reduce complexity and come to a clearer overall design. But of course the typical 5 day Java or C++ course will not get you there. You must learn to think in OOP -- and that is a process that might take years.
  - sklogic 11y ago
    Could you please point to a classic example of a good OOP design, where it is clear that OOP made it simpler.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]

d--b 11y ago

Can someone make a chrome extension to filter out the OOP vs FP articles on hacker news? I mean, how many more articles do we need? Is there anything new? Yes, FP is cleaner. Yes, OOP is useful for things like plugins. Yes, favor composition over inheritance. Yes, FP is impossible to read. Yes, immutability has its limits. Yes, Yes, Yes. Enough already.

merb 11y ago
Even FP needs some mutability when it comes to databases and user input. let's consider a website you would need io -> handler -> database so the io and the database is a mutable connection between the handler that by itself could be fully mutable. Mostly I think most problems of OOP and FP are solved by Reactive Streams since they encourage small units and each unit could be either programmed with OOP or with a Functional Style. This solves a lot of things. Btw. I'm mostly writing Scala and I love it, still I use some Objects or sometimes use Java. Golang or other stuff. It mostly depends what I'm doing.
brudgers 11y ago
The filter exists. It is community + flag. It works in all browsers.

radu_floricica 11y ago

Depends on how you use it, of course. Libraries make wonderful showcases for OOP strengths - I always like to give Java Collections as an example. But if you actually build your application code as OOP... well, I might privately think you deserve everything that happens to you because of that. I think education carries most of the guilt for this. The typical examples given in OOS classes are stuff like Car is an ancestor of Truck and SportsCar. Which led to Beans and Entreprise Java. You never want this kind of shit with your data. Much better to use plain old maps to carry content the way God intended, and to put your effort in creating flexible and reusable methods.

JupiterMoon 11y ago
This example looks bad to me -- shouldn't it be that car, truck and sports car have (at most) a common vehicle superclass?
sz4kerto 11y ago
> But if you actually build your application code as OOP > Beans and Entreprise Java I don't know. Netflix is built on Java, using OOP. It works well for them. Windows is built on OOP, quite a big application and works. J2EE has its problems, but it also gives you a lot of functionality. Reusing methods is nice, but developers on projects with very complex business rules (does not equal simple, but large scale projects!) don't worry that much about flexible methods as they're experienced enough. Distributed transactions, session replication, etc. are slightly more important. J2EE gives you all that by default. (And I really don't like EJBs and this kind of stuff, but don't mix up two very different levels of problems.)
- radu_floricica 11y ago
  > J2EE has its problems, but it also gives you a lot of functionality I did have that in the back of my head when I wrote the comment. And speaking of, I'm also aware that OOP was very popular, and I don't feel completely comfortable when I criticize successful stuff - it must have worked for a reason. But still, that's as far as my brain can take me by itself: OOP should be used sparingly and EJB should not exist. (For the record I code mostly in Java, though as lisp-like as I can)

deleted 11y ago

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baxter001 11y ago

Wow, so many people commenting in the thread below that article seem to have swallowed tiny uncle bobs.

chmike 11y ago

This argumentation is compilation of unjustified and demonstrated claims. It really doesn't help in understanding the author's point.

malux85 11y ago

"All evidence" https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/

radu_floricica 11y ago

> Probably as good as any other programming paradigma out there. I take offence with postmodern relativism. Not every paradigm is created equal (and for the record, black culture is less "good" than white culture. Come on, "acting white" because you have good grades?). The way to get better as a professional is to analyze various ways of doing stuff and find which is better and how much of it you can use. This article does exactly that.

hahainternet 11y ago
Jesus christ you really destroyed any chance anyone had of taking your point seriously by just throwing in some racism.
- radu_floricica 11y ago
  I'm a misogynist as well. How does that affect my argument? That's the point of throwing in a controversial example: no matter how you feel about an issue, reality is still out there, with hard edges and sharp points. If you ignore it and go the "everything is just as good"-way, you suffer. You may feel good about yourself, but you still do worse.
  - hahainternet 11y ago
    > I'm a misogynist as well. How does that affect my argument? It makes me concerned that if I agree with it, I am doing so because of equally faulty logic that has led you to believe racist and sexist claims should not be judged harshly.
  - zamalek 11y ago
    > How does that affect my argument? It's irrelevant to the discussion, so: no. Both add nothing to the topic of the discussion and are thus completely worthless opinions within this context. You can be whatever you like, but your prejudices have nothing to do with OOP - leave them out of this discussion please.
  - brudgers 11y ago

billsix 11y ago

I found it ironic that he used a quote from Alan Kay to attempt further his point that "object-oriented programming is bullshit"

dang 11y ago
Yes, and the 'quote' from Dijkstra, who would certainly have known about OO's Norwegian roots, sounds bogus as well. Wikiquote lists it as unsourced. A bit of Googling yields no source for the alleged Alan Kay quote either.

chmike 11y ago

This argumentation is a compilation of unjustified and demonstrated claims. It really doesn't help in understanding the author's point.

anta40 11y ago

Wonder why the author doesn't mention Smalltalk. Or Ruby...

mtrn 11y ago

Zed Shaw talked about experiences teaching programming in this LXTHW series. I cannot cite the exact source right now, but in essence he said, that novices grasp all concepts up to OOP, where there is no more analogy in computer architecture and people seem to get stuck.

dmvaldman 11y ago

[Shameless plug] For a philosophical interpretation on the differences between OOP and FP, you may enjoy my gist: Descartes, Berkeley and Functional Reactive Programming https://gist.github.com/dmvaldman/f957dd9a8ed3f6edf35d https://gist.github.com/dmvaldman/f957dd9a8ed3f6edf35d

n0us 11y ago
It's actually a common misquote of Descartes to say "I think therefore I am." A more proper translation is "I think, I am" which has significant implications for his philosophy.
- irremediable 11y ago
  As I understand it, this isn't a misquote/mistranslation at all. He said "I think, I am" and "I think therefore I am" in different works exploring the same topics, without a lot of distinction between them.
- chucksmash 11y ago
  It is not a misquotation. In Meditations on First Philosophy what he says translates to "I think, I am" but he'd used "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) in previous works. Subtlely different meanings to be parsed...

JupiterMoon 11y ago

Humanity has to accept that half of any population (including the team in our current workplace) is less intelligent than the other half. Then when we address a problem we have to accept that both halves will have to touch the problem at some stage in a project. Following this we need to aim for simplicity rather than complexity. With this in mind I think that both FP and OOP can be used to build simpler programs but that OOP has in the past failed in doing this. Basically I think we need to use tooling (in which I include languages and paradigms) that aim to come with less foot-guns and more safety rails.

JupiterMoon 11y ago
Just wondering why people don't like this post? Anyone care to explain why I'm wrong or maybe discuss?

MrDosu 11y ago

I agree with Carmack on: "'good C++' is better than 'good C'" OOP has some brilliant patterns. It is also very hard to do correctly.

sklogic 11y ago
Good C++ is a generic C++. And generic programming is incompatible with OOP. Those who do not agree with this statement should stop using STL.

danmaz74 11y ago

Does anybody know of any language that supports OO, but that lets you declare pure functions/methods - enforcing that those pure functions/methods only use other pure functions, don't use global objects, etc? Lately we're adopting Redux [1] together with React and the idea of being able to mix functional and OO in a better way looks more and more interesting to me. [1] https://github.com/rackt/redux https://github.com/rackt/redux

bitJericho 11y ago
Don't you need both in a language that supports both? I use a language that offers both but I only use methods.
AlexeyBrin 11y ago
Does anybody know of any language that supports OO, but that lets you declare pure functions/methods - enforcing that those pure functions/methods only use other pure functions, don't use global objects, etc? Well, turns out that one of the oldest programming languages in existence, Fortran lets you do OOP, it also has pure functions and subroutines. I'm talking about about Fortran 95/2003/2008: http://h21007.www2.hp.com/portal/download/files/unprot/fortran/docs/lrm/lrm0157.htm http://h21007.www2.hp.com/portal/download/files/unprot/fortr...
- danmaz74 11y ago
  I would never have guessed. I wonder why this didn't spread more - it looks like a great way to mix FP and OOP.
DanWaterworth 11y ago
I'm actually working on such a language [1]. It's OOP, but it makes a division between 'doing objects' (services) and 'being objects' (values). It's coming along, but it's still missing many vital things. It wasn't inspired by, but bares a striking resemblance to, the noop language [2]. [1] https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/plastic https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/plastic [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noop https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noop

nailer 11y ago

I appreciate there's something I'm missing, but: I use closures to hold state all the time in node, I still don't understand why state in a closure is better than state in an object. If someone could explain this I'd be grateful: articles like this just seem to say 'state is bad' and ignore that it still exists in functional scopes.

pvdebbe 11y ago
It's not really state if it's immutable. Not the case with node, but closures in general match the notion of parameterized functions (like f_a(x)).
seabee 11y ago
State in a closure is equally as bad as state in an object. The difference is FP gives you ways to manage and isolate state that simply don't exist in OOP.
- deleted 11y ago
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nly 11y ago

Seems as good a thread as any to drop this Bjarne Stroustrup - Object Oriented Programming without Inheritance - ECOOP 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcpSLRpOMJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcpSLRpOMJM

hacker_9 11y ago

Compare the DirectX XNA OOP library to the OpenGL procedural library, and you will quickly see that when OOP is done right it makes code fun and easy to work with again. In my my mind OOP is the next logical step after procedural programming (simply packaging up a set of procedures into an object, and adding a few new ideas like inheritance and so on). Functional programming though is not the next logical step; it is a total paradigm shift. The main argument is that you get rid of state etc which means you can parallelize better - but why are no cutting edge games made in an FP language I wonder? Surely they would want to distribute all the physics collision rendering and so on to multiple cores? It's because functional programming as a separate language makes no sense, you lose too much. But incorporating FP style into OOP languages (such as with the new C++ constexpr, C# linq, and Java lambda), and giving the programmer the choice to use it when it makes sense is a far more powerful option.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
OOP is about information hiding and providing well defined state transitions. objects are used to hold a state and to act as gateway for valid transitions. most complaints I see come from people using OO programming languages badly, leaking abstractions all over the place and making it so you have to mentally take care of the state of everything instead of trusting your objects to take care of themselves, and thus you get the worst of both world: rigidity coupled with complexity I need information hiding because my brain is only so big, so I cannot possibly have in mind the whole application state and all it's permutation at all time while programming. functional languages work similarly in a sense: you avoid thinking about state transitions because the only things you have to take care of is each function input and output in a broader sense, programming becomes way way simpler if you think of your functions as having 4 well defined input output: the inputs, the return values, data from a persistent store and a state. And with experience you start noticing that it is much much more simple and productive if in any of your method at a given time you only reduce the 4 io ports in 2: on one side you have functional languages, only ever working with inputs and returns, on the other you have OO languages, which focus so much on the input, state and state, return couples. mastering the ability of using both styles where appropriate is the key here. but people get dragged into name specific too much, forgetting that these pattern emerged from coding and not the other way around.

randomsearch 11y ago

A little off-topic, but do people think that mainstream software development will ever be mainly functional, or more likely to be an OO-Functional hybrid like OCaml, Scala, or F#? Just wondering what to learn next.

xamuel 11y ago

The best way to see through language paradigm war propaganda is to look at pseudocode. Scientists, mathematicians, logicians write tons of pseudocode and it's almost entirely procedural.

sklogic 11y ago
Exactly. It is never anywhere near anything OOP. More verbs, less nouns.
AnonymousPlanet 11y ago
As one of those people who have used pseudocode in papers, I have to disagree. In a scientific paper, you describe what you have in mind using mathematical definitions. This makes it easier to reason about (proofs) and to describe it in an unambiguous way to other people (papers). Pseudocode is used to describe an algorithm following those mathematical definitions. In your paper, you might use sets. A set is defined by what it contains or does not contain. Never by how the elements found their way into the set. Including that kind of implementation detail is considered bad form (cf. forest and trees). If you wish to implement it using purely procedural code, FP, or OOP is up to you. Don't think scientists shun any kind of method just because they rarely talk about it. And for the record, I remember a number of papers that used pseudocode that could have been directly translated to working code using an OOP paradigm.
- xamuel 11y ago
  The algorithm might take set(s) as input, sure. If that's inherently OOP then C structs are OOP. In any case, what actually happens to those sets once they're declared, will probably be procedural. "Let I be the intersection of A and B." "Let Restriction be those elements of S which are positive." Etc. You'll rarely ever see factories, managers, private variables, explicit inheritance, or any other flagship OO mechanisms in pseudocode.
  - AnonymousPlanet 11y ago
    > You'll rarely ever see factories, managers, private variables, explicit inheritance, or any other flagship OO mechanisms in pseudocode. Because they are implementation details that have no place in pseudocode. Their absence there does not say anything about their usefulness in general. You can't point at some observation about pseudocode and say "See, they don't use it so it must be rubbish." Exceptions, handling of error variables, monads, unsigned ints are also absent from typical pseudocode (unless the context is about those concepts). Does that make them useless concepts aswell?

stonemetal 11y ago

For an article with evidence in the title, it is sorely lacking. Pretty words are proof of nothing.

gutnor 11y ago

This article is just pointing at the flaws, not really offering any alternative. It is just as GP said, a rant better kept for the water cooler area. You can guess that functional programming is going to be his response I suppose considering this page is the second part of a functional programming article. (the first part being missing) If you want to analyse, you would need to also talk about what OOP is good at and how that translate in whatever other paradigm. This article only concludes with a "I do think it is a valuable mechanism for developing software", but there is absolutely no backing for that statement anywhere in the article. I tend to agree with GP. At the end of the day, for general programming, any paradigm is going to end up producing similar quality of code. Developer competence, motivation and budget are going to be #1 factors that determine code quality. Google, OSS, Modern IDE, Engineering practices like Continuous Integration/Deployment, TDD/BDD are all having a much bigger impact on the code quality than the specific languages or paradigms.

radu_floricica 11y ago
> At the end of the day, for general programming, any paradigm is going to end up producing similar quality of code. Developer competence I'd say that "pure" paradigms tend to be almost equally bad (tried functional programming in production code, wasn't all it's advertised to be). But this actually leaves you with more freedom, because you have to pick pieces and create your own style. So it turns out to be more important, not less, that you understand the how and why of each paradigm. As for how good this particular article was - well, I agree with the premise and it gives links to sources. May not be the Mona Lisa of articles, but it got my upvote. I'm not a regular HN reader so it's the first article on this topic I've seen in a while.
excepttheweasel 11y ago
Author here, FWIW this article was one of many posts some colleagues and I wrote at Pivotal during a "blog writing tontine" to encourage us all to write more and develop our skills, written hastily and intended to be part of a series I didn't finish before leaving. My intention was to point readers to some of the good ideas that were emerging (more accurately: had emerged some time ago) from alternative paradigms and how they could be used to make OOP programs better. Agreed that its certainly more about the team than what syntax you use to push bytes around, but tools do matter.

anon4 11y ago

To me, as a C++ programmer, none of this really matters. I'm working on a very compute-intensive program with a lot of modules, used in professional settings. It has to go fast. If using C++ means we can go faster than someone using whatever else, at the expense of needing five times the people and six times the development effort, we'll pick C++. We're interested in the maximum performance achievable with the language, not the average use-case. Someone would ask "why not assembly/plain C/Fortran/etc.". The answer is that C++ gives you a lot of good ways to structure your code semantically, while still letting you produce tight machine code. That's the real kicker here - I need to reason about my program as an engineering construct running on real hardware, not as an expression of Computer Science algorithms. In a nutshell, for a new programming language to be a viable way to build our core product, it has to 1. Go Fast and let us Go Faster Than Everyone Else, preferably letting me write platform-specific assembly when I need to 2. Interoperate with C++ I've seen a few recent languages attempt to cover 1., e.g. Go, Rust, Julia, for some use cases. However, I have never seen a language attempt to tackle 2. Not even for the case when you have vanilla classes with virtual functions and a few sane templates.

tadlan 11y ago
Check out Julia ' s Cxx.jl. it's probably the best c++ FFI in any language. You can even evaluation and call cpp code on the fly from the repl
steveklabnik 11y ago
D does some attempt at 2.
godDLL 11y ago
Wait, is there a common ABI for C++? I genuinely don't know.

zamalek 11y ago

OOP, as defined as a set of principles, is a complete load of horse shit. There are many more reasons other than what the article states as to why it doesn't deal with realities of software (e.g. data oriented programming solves some of them). OOP principles are likely one of the reasons it takes so long to train fresh-out-of-college employees, as they first need to learn how to forget that utter bullshit. However, that does not mean that OOP languages are a bust. It is only the OOP principles that are a problem. So far my experience goes, I've learned to mostly stop creating analogues of real-world things (as OOP principles would have it), except where it makes sense to, and instead use OOP features to create distinct responsibilities. Turns out OOP languages are identical to, let's say, "responsibility oriented programming" languages. OOP languages can also be used for other things, as previously mentioned: data oriented programming. DOP is used widely in gamedev. Gamedev also happens to be an industry that heavily uses an OOP language: C++. Hate the principles, not the languages. There's a big difference.

lunz 11y ago
> stop creating analogues of real-world things I agree. Almost everything useful around us is the product of ideas with our needs in mind, there was no TV and TV remote control in nature, no vacuum cleaner, clothes, watches... if ever, nature inspired us. We create artitifical things that make us more efficient and effective than it would be by just dealing with raw stones and sticks as they are found in nature. When it comes to today OOP we have to deal with stones and sticks again instead of thinking about a new aritifical thing that directly satisfies our needs (you call it 'responsibility').
- zamalek 11y ago
  > you call it 'responsibility' That was simply the closest word I could come up with. You've described what I was trying to say in significantly more detail (thanks!).

Delmania 11y ago

As a comment indicates, all evidence points to this article being a load of bullshit. There's not a single concrete example in it that proves anything of the author's claim. To counter, I think this will do nicely: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/07/31/the-success-of-oop/ http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/07/31/the-success-of-oop/

k__ 11y ago

I really like many points of FP. I like to stick to immutability, map-reduce and expecially Redux. But after I saw a comparison of OOP and FP [0] I had to laugh a bit. What about monads and category theory? I also didn't fully grasp FRP with all its streams and lifting. [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CNPKc6xU8AApYPy.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CNPKc6xU8AApYPy.jpg

asgard1024 11y ago

I believe OOP gained such a foothold in programming world because it was (and still is) very useful for building GUIs on the PC. Since PCs have taken over the world, so had the OOP. But in other areas the OOP model is questionable. For example, you have transaction processing applications that have been built for years on mainframes with different models.

armitron 11y ago

Entirely content-free bullshit article.