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You have some good points. But have you tried Idris or Agda? My problem with OO is one of culture. If and only if you work with big codebases you start to feel

You have some good points. But have you tried Idris or Agda? My problem with OO is one of culture. If and only if you work with big codebases you start to feel that you can’t make assumptions about anything. For all I know the plus operator can send nukes. Then they say it doesn’t matter because they made the perfect lasagna with a million layers. I know there’s a million ways to code with oo to make it better. But I never saw that enforced by tools which is a must if we are a thousand developers in the same company. Meanwhile if I see a concept in Haskell I can in most cases just trust the assumptions. Also the compiler researchers that I adore are those that focus on making proofs and stable code, not the ones trying to dumb down programming to make it accessible. You build a house, which is more important, a good foundation (built on math) or accessibility for the beginner builders?

taurath 7y ago
Cognitive overhead is the key word for me here - it can be just as difficult to reason about massively long function chains as a bunch of stateful classes, but usually in my experience an OO codebase follows conways law very tightly in that you get a history of how developers were split up - not discreet units of functionality with well defined interfaces. It’s hard to say something is objectively better, but it’s along the same lines to me as not buying a car from a manufacturer with a bad reputation.
- jyounker 7y ago
  That not an OO thing. That is Conway's law. It applies to all software.
  - mijoharas 7y ago
    > usually in my experience an OO codebase follows conways law very tightly grandparent comment is saying that OO codebases express conways law more fully (as it is definitely a spectrum). I don't have an opinion on it either way (beyond stating that adherance to conways law is a spectrum rather than binary), just clarifying.
repolfx 7y ago
The Haskell community is full of terrible culture, things like badly designed libraries that assume the type signatures are the same thing as documentation, or ridiculous constructs designed to seem clever or work around the various straitjackets Haskell imposes. If you feel you can just 'trust the assumptions' in Haskell but not in OO environments you've probably just been comparing very different codebases written by very different programmers. In a codebase that uses OOP well it's very easy to understand what assumptions you can make and the tooling can be excellent. For instance, IntelliJ will happily show you all the possible implementations of a virtual method if you're using polymorphism. "It might launch the nukes" is pure Haskell meme noise - the equivalent unexpected behaviour for Haskell would be a difficult to understand space leak.
mbrock 7y ago
Building a house rests on a long history of crafting and engineering. If working builders needed to understand abstract algebra we might have a lot fewer of them. The foundation of construction isn’t really mathematical. You can build a house without even doing a single measurement. Accessibility for beginner builders is in fact very important. I’ve used Agda. It’s extremely difficult. Even pretty basic proofs can be extremely tricky; just figuring out how to use the transitive equality proof syntax is a challenge. You quickly run into the need for stuff like “universe polymorphism” which comes with a huge and terrifying theory. If this is the only way to make decent programs then we’re doomed!

taurath 7y ago

Cognitive overhead is the key word for me here - it can be just as difficult to reason about massively long function chains as a bunch of stateful classes, but usually in my experience an OO codebase follows conways law very tightly in that you get a history of how developers were split up - not discreet units of functionality with well defined interfaces. It’s hard to say something is objectively better, but it’s along the same lines to me as not buying a car from a manufacturer with a bad reputation.

jyounker 7y ago
That not an OO thing. That is Conway's law. It applies to all software.
- mijoharas 7y ago
  > usually in my experience an OO codebase follows conways law very tightly grandparent comment is saying that OO codebases express conways law more fully (as it is definitely a spectrum). I don't have an opinion on it either way (beyond stating that adherance to conways law is a spectrum rather than binary), just clarifying.

repolfx 7y ago

The Haskell community is full of terrible culture, things like badly designed libraries that assume the type signatures are the same thing as documentation, or ridiculous constructs designed to seem clever or work around the various straitjackets Haskell imposes. If you feel you can just 'trust the assumptions' in Haskell but not in OO environments you've probably just been comparing very different codebases written by very different programmers. In a codebase that uses OOP well it's very easy to understand what assumptions you can make and the tooling can be excellent. For instance, IntelliJ will happily show you all the possible implementations of a virtual method if you're using polymorphism. "It might launch the nukes" is pure Haskell meme noise - the equivalent unexpected behaviour for Haskell would be a difficult to understand space leak.

mbrock 7y ago

Building a house rests on a long history of crafting and engineering. If working builders needed to understand abstract algebra we might have a lot fewer of them. The foundation of construction isn’t really mathematical. You can build a house without even doing a single measurement. Accessibility for beginner builders is in fact very important. I’ve used Agda. It’s extremely difficult. Even pretty basic proofs can be extremely tricky; just figuring out how to use the transitive equality proof syntax is a challenge. You quickly run into the need for stuff like “universe polymorphism” which comes with a huge and terrifying theory. If this is the only way to make decent programs then we’re doomed!