5 ms·

Object Oriented Programming has Failed Us

24 points by nreece 18y ago

andreyf 18y ago
Meanwhile, back at the lab, we need to come up with a programming environment that most people understand naturally. We need to do usability studies on the languages we develop just like we test applications we develop for users. Isn't that how Vista was designed? Wouldn't it be a better idea to have a really curious and imaginative person (an artist, if you will) work on the language that will last 100 years? On the other hand, I think this article borders on a good criticism of Arc: could it be that PG's focus on writing a language is misguided? Maybe it would be a better idea to focus on something more abstract: in particular, on inventing better fundamental representations for our programs (as Alan Kay did, when he thought about OOP)? I'd imagine Paul's response would be that macros -the "blurring of the line" between interpreter and interpreted- is the mind-opening change in representation. Does the problem lie in helping people cross this line?
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  It's also how Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows 95, and most of their precursors were designed. There's just been an acceptance amongst OS designers that testing with real humans is the only way to know if things are actually easy. Programming languages are unique, however, in that the people building them are often also the users (and the more this is true, the better the language tends to be). C was designed to build UNIX, while ADA was designed for a customer...and we know which one survived. But, I also simply can't buy the "people understand naturally" logic. People understand very little "naturally"...and even if you include pre-existing knowledge (like English, or spatial skills) in this "natural" knowledge you still end up with a pretty horrendous and limited programming language. Explaining an algorithm in English almost always takes a lot more "code" than writing it in a decent high level language.
  - andreyf 18y ago
    testing with real humans is the only way to know if things are actually easy Yes, yes, of course, sorry for being unclear - I just meant that we shouldn't rely on design-by-focus-groups or design-by-committee exclusively, that imaginative solutions require creativity, and for that you need someone with taste. People understand very little "naturally"... Well, OOP utilizes our spacial skills, at least in the form of all those pretty UML graphs? There is certainly a lot of thinking left to do about how exactly we understand programming languages, both on macro and micro levels - what metaphors we use to understand scope, objects, functional concepts, etc. It's from this thinking that new language designs will arise.
    - stcredzero 18y ago
      CRC cards on 3x5" card-stock are better than UML. Otherwise, I agree. Until GUIs for applications are as natural as passing 3x5 cards around, there's going to be an impedance mismatch between the GUI and the domain.
  - Kaizyn 18y ago
    Ada has a pretty impressive record in safety critical systems; something that cannot be said of C. Aircraft software systems and many air traffic control systems in particular are all written in Ada.
    - SwellJoe 18y ago
      And yet, somehow, I've never seen a single line of live ADA code...and there are literally hundreds of millions of lines of C code doing work right now. Not only that, someone is almost certainly starting a new program written in C right now...and now...and now...and now. And...you, guessed it, now. I'm sure Ada had a useful life, possibly even in a niche where C would never be an effective tool. I was just saying that design-by-committee, even with a lot of user input, is probably not the right way to build a timeless programming language, and that building a language while using the language probably is.
      - gaius 18y ago
        Funny, I look at Ada every day ('cept it's called PL/SQL).
        huherto 18y ago
        Please explain
        gaius 18y ago
        Ada never caught on as a general purpose programming language, but a subset of it lives on in PL/SQL, the embedded language in Oracle. It's not the most flexible or elegant language, but it's easy enough to learn and extremely reliable. It's all about choosing the right tool for the job. Sure you can run C in-process with your database, but unless you really, really have to it's a bit pointless to risk i.
thinkcomp 18y ago
I don't think this article is particularly well-written. However, I do agree with the conclusion. For web-based programming, object oriented programming is simply ridiculous in all but a small number of cases. That's why the Lampshade framework I wrote is purely procedural, and why I'm able to write software on top of it so quickly. Client-side GUI programming is a different story, in my opinion. In general, just because you're capable of understanding complex, abstract concepts doesn't mean that it's always best to use them.
- andreyf 18y ago
  For web-based programming, object oriented programming is simply ridiculous in all but a small number of cases. Agreed. Functional programming seems to make a lot more sense. Fundamentally, isn't a web server just a function f: url -> html? Sure, databases and sessions complicate things, but even in these cases, functional structures seem a lot more elegant (in a mathematical sense) than OOP ones.
  - swombat 18y ago
    For any programming, OOP brings some advantages. What you might be decrying is over-the-top abuse of OOP patterns. Certainly, for most programming, abuse of design patterns is unwarranted. However, taking, as an example, Ruby, which is both a functional and OOP language, the OOP features make the language a lot nicer. Anyway, that article is completely daft. And I refuse to take any advice about programming from someone who spells "linear" as "linier". Shame there's no down-mod button.
- jcromartie 18y ago
  > However, I do agree with the conclusion. For web-based programming, object oriented programming is simply ridiculous in all but a small number of cases. I read his conclusion as that object oriented programming has failed us because it is too hard to understand, and we need a new, simpler, more accessible, dumbed-down programming paradigm. He is advocating programming for non-programmers, which has been tried many times before and has always met the worst kind of failure (universal disdain by "real" programmers).
davidmathers 18y ago
Hacker News Is Failing Us. This link is currently in the #2 position on the front page. I wonder if the people who up voted it actually read it or just agreed with the thesis?
- andreyf 18y ago
  I cringed at the comparison to mathematical proofs and the "multidimensional" aspects of programming (whatever that means), but the thesis was good, and I'm interested in how the HN community can expound on it... hence, the upvote.
  - Kaizyn 18y ago
    How is the thesis good? The thesis states: average developers are too dumb to grok object-oriented programming so that some alternative simpler method for data hiding and encapsulation needs to be adopted. Only the really smart people should be allowed to dabble in the dark arts of OOP, and only then if they've been properly mentored by an elite priesthood.
    - Zak 18y ago
      Programming is hard. Let's go shopping. The article comes near, but does not directly address the fact that OOP is just one of several techniques and language features that have, over the years promised to make programming easy. People either fail to understand and properly adopt the new techniques or they do adopt the new techniques and simply find something else that makes programming hard. The best we can hope for is that a technique expands what is within the reach of the average programmer. The problem of the day gets moved to the solved category and we move on to bigger and better things, which are also hard. Those of us who enjoy programming and earn a living from it should hope that this cycle is not broken.
- greyman 18y ago
  Or, we are failing ourselves, but otherwise you are completely right. There is nothing in the article explaining why author thinks that "Object Oriented Programming has Failed Us". Anyway, this is a good way to trick Hacker News: 1. Write curious title with some programming term in it. 2. Write some random thoughts in the article body mentioning the term. 3. Submit to HN 4. Traffic!
greendestiny 18y ago
Object Orientation failed because it's too hard to understand? I blinked in incredulity. Object Orientation hasn't failed, but we're coming to appreciate its short comings as a sole design paradigm. For C programmers, C++ gave them access to variable execution via polymorphism (without ugly function pointers) and more flexible scoping via classes. In languages that provide first class and anonymous functions polymorphism is a lot less useful and closures provide better scoping flexibility than classes. Languages that have these features make it obvious how restrictive C++ is in binding this functionality in with the type system. In languages like ruby, python, javascript, lisp and smalltalk object orientation serves in its proper place as a type definition system and people use it appropriately. It's only C++ that has failed us.
- timr 18y ago
  "closures provide better scoping flexibility than classes. Languages that have these features make it obvious how restrictive C++ is in binding this functionality in with the type system." C++ can/does do anonymous functions (for example, see boost lambda), and can even give you most of what you want from first-class functions and closures (using functors). The parts that you don't get are due mostly to the fact that C++ doesn't have built-in garbage collection. It's a speed limitation, not a type-safety limitation. Now for my rant: there seems to be a backlash against type safety in this forum that I don't understand. Granted, if all you ever do is develop dinky webapps with your best friends, permissive languages allow for rapid development (mostly because they let you get away with murder). However, once you have more than a few developers and a few tens of thousand lines of code, the benefits of strict typing become rapidly apparent. The chaotic, free-for-all mentality of languages like Ruby is great for rapid prototyping, but it kinda sucks for developing in more formal scenarios. It may be "harder" to develop with strongly typed languages, but that's usually an indication that you're having to think a bit before you act. That's rarely a bad thing!
  - greendestiny 18y ago
    Well templates do let you do just about everything being a meta-programming language - however libraries rarely use them and they are very complicated to implement yourself. I've not found static typing to be a big productivity win. I think it disallows a small subset of bugs. Like most people I've been a C++ programmer because it was the highest performance language with the best support for operating and window systems. I'm gleefully looking forward to it playing a smaller and smaller part of my programming work.
softwarejim 18y ago
I can't get passed the spelling and grammer mistakes personally
- yan 18y ago
  "I can't get passed the spelling and grammer mistakes personally" *grammar
  - jraines 18y ago
    *past
    - Xichekolas 18y ago
      Now that is ironic.
aggieben 18y ago
I really hate to say this, as much as I like object oriented programming but, I really think we might be better off if we went back to procedural programming for the bulk of the applications that we write and left the object oriented stuff to people who really understand it and for problems that can not be solved any other way. Meanwhile, back at the lab, we need to come up with a programming environment that most people understand naturally. We need to do usability studies on the languages we develop just like we test applications we develop for users. Instead of trying to simplify what we are already doing, which continues to provide solutions that only programmers understand, we need to provide solutions that are no longer programmer centric. Isn't this what we used to call Visual Basic?
- stcredzero 18y ago
  It seems to be natural to do GUI-centric programming as in Visual Basic. People like attaching ideas to things that they can see. I think that the real problem is that there is an Impedance Mismatch between current GUIs and the domain. Once we have solved this, then the natural way to program won't conflict so drastically with good Object Oriented practices. I'm not sure if we can get there before we reach the level of GUIs in Minority Report, but I think we won't need quite all of that.
edw519 18y ago
"...and left the object oriented stuff to people who really understand it and for problems that can not be solved any other way." And an example of such a problem would be...? The single biggest problem with "language war" threads like this is that people actually believe this is the "only way". "Better way"? Maybe. "Only way"? Hardly. Anything you can do in your language (object oriented or not), I can do in mine. Maybe not as slick, but it can be done.
bporterfield 18y ago
I find it very hard to agree with thesis when there is absolutely no backing information about how OO programming is "hard". What are the difficulties people are having with OO? How can I take this article seriously when it's nothing more than a statement followed by some fluff followed by a few half-thought suggestions. Who are these 'people these people who 'really understand' OO programming? Am I one of them? Are you? How are we to know with no example of HOW OO is hard? What exactly is so hard about it? Class Apple extends Fruit. apple = new Apple(). apple.eat(). Makes sense to me. How are people using it wrong? Is the real issue that people don't understand when to use it? Here's a similar article: Playing poker is hard. A lot of people really don't understand how to play poker. People that play poker should stop, and start playing go fish. They should leave poker to the professionals that understand poker. All poker books should now become go fish books.

24 points by nreece 18y ago

Meanwhile, back at the lab, we need to come up with a programming environment that most people understand naturally. We need to do usability studies on the languages we develop just like we test applications we develop for users. Isn't that how Vista was designed? Wouldn't it be a better idea to have a really curious and imaginative person (an artist, if you will) work on the language that will last 100 years? On the other hand, I think this article borders on a good criticism of Arc: could it be that PG's focus on writing a language is misguided? Maybe it would be a better idea to focus on something more abstract: in particular, on inventing better fundamental representations for our programs (as Alan Kay did, when he thought about OOP)? I'd imagine Paul's response would be that macros -the "blurring of the line" between interpreter and interpreted- is the mind-opening change in representation. Does the problem lie in helping people cross this line?

SwellJoe 18y ago
It's also how Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows 95, and most of their precursors were designed. There's just been an acceptance amongst OS designers that testing with real humans is the only way to know if things are actually easy. Programming languages are unique, however, in that the people building them are often also the users (and the more this is true, the better the language tends to be). C was designed to build UNIX, while ADA was designed for a customer...and we know which one survived. But, I also simply can't buy the "people understand naturally" logic. People understand very little "naturally"...and even if you include pre-existing knowledge (like English, or spatial skills) in this "natural" knowledge you still end up with a pretty horrendous and limited programming language. Explaining an algorithm in English almost always takes a lot more "code" than writing it in a decent high level language.
- andreyf 18y ago
  testing with real humans is the only way to know if things are actually easy Yes, yes, of course, sorry for being unclear - I just meant that we shouldn't rely on design-by-focus-groups or design-by-committee exclusively, that imaginative solutions require creativity, and for that you need someone with taste. People understand very little "naturally"... Well, OOP utilizes our spacial skills, at least in the form of all those pretty UML graphs? There is certainly a lot of thinking left to do about how exactly we understand programming languages, both on macro and micro levels - what metaphors we use to understand scope, objects, functional concepts, etc. It's from this thinking that new language designs will arise.
  - stcredzero 18y ago
    CRC cards on 3x5" card-stock are better than UML. Otherwise, I agree. Until GUIs for applications are as natural as passing 3x5 cards around, there's going to be an impedance mismatch between the GUI and the domain.
- Kaizyn 18y ago
  Ada has a pretty impressive record in safety critical systems; something that cannot be said of C. Aircraft software systems and many air traffic control systems in particular are all written in Ada.
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    And yet, somehow, I've never seen a single line of live ADA code...and there are literally hundreds of millions of lines of C code doing work right now. Not only that, someone is almost certainly starting a new program written in C right now...and now...and now...and now. And...you, guessed it, now. I'm sure Ada had a useful life, possibly even in a niche where C would never be an effective tool. I was just saying that design-by-committee, even with a lot of user input, is probably not the right way to build a timeless programming language, and that building a language while using the language probably is.
    - gaius 18y ago
      Funny, I look at Ada every day ('cept it's called PL/SQL).
      - huherto 18y ago
        Please explain
        gaius 18y ago
        Ada never caught on as a general purpose programming language, but a subset of it lives on in PL/SQL, the embedded language in Oracle. It's not the most flexible or elegant language, but it's easy enough to learn and extremely reliable. It's all about choosing the right tool for the job. Sure you can run C in-process with your database, but unless you really, really have to it's a bit pointless to risk i.

thinkcomp 18y ago

I don't think this article is particularly well-written. However, I do agree with the conclusion. For web-based programming, object oriented programming is simply ridiculous in all but a small number of cases. That's why the Lampshade framework I wrote is purely procedural, and why I'm able to write software on top of it so quickly. Client-side GUI programming is a different story, in my opinion. In general, just because you're capable of understanding complex, abstract concepts doesn't mean that it's always best to use them.

andreyf 18y ago
For web-based programming, object oriented programming is simply ridiculous in all but a small number of cases. Agreed. Functional programming seems to make a lot more sense. Fundamentally, isn't a web server just a function f: url -> html? Sure, databases and sessions complicate things, but even in these cases, functional structures seem a lot more elegant (in a mathematical sense) than OOP ones.
- swombat 18y ago
  For any programming, OOP brings some advantages. What you might be decrying is over-the-top abuse of OOP patterns. Certainly, for most programming, abuse of design patterns is unwarranted. However, taking, as an example, Ruby, which is both a functional and OOP language, the OOP features make the language a lot nicer. Anyway, that article is completely daft. And I refuse to take any advice about programming from someone who spells "linear" as "linier". Shame there's no down-mod button.
jcromartie 18y ago
> However, I do agree with the conclusion. For web-based programming, object oriented programming is simply ridiculous in all but a small number of cases. I read his conclusion as that object oriented programming has failed us because it is too hard to understand, and we need a new, simpler, more accessible, dumbed-down programming paradigm. He is advocating programming for non-programmers, which has been tried many times before and has always met the worst kind of failure (universal disdain by "real" programmers).

davidmathers 18y ago

Hacker News Is Failing Us. This link is currently in the #2 position on the front page. I wonder if the people who up voted it actually read it or just agreed with the thesis?

andreyf 18y ago
I cringed at the comparison to mathematical proofs and the "multidimensional" aspects of programming (whatever that means), but the thesis was good, and I'm interested in how the HN community can expound on it... hence, the upvote.
- Kaizyn 18y ago
  How is the thesis good? The thesis states: average developers are too dumb to grok object-oriented programming so that some alternative simpler method for data hiding and encapsulation needs to be adopted. Only the really smart people should be allowed to dabble in the dark arts of OOP, and only then if they've been properly mentored by an elite priesthood.
  - Zak 18y ago
    Programming is hard. Let's go shopping. The article comes near, but does not directly address the fact that OOP is just one of several techniques and language features that have, over the years promised to make programming easy. People either fail to understand and properly adopt the new techniques or they do adopt the new techniques and simply find something else that makes programming hard. The best we can hope for is that a technique expands what is within the reach of the average programmer. The problem of the day gets moved to the solved category and we move on to bigger and better things, which are also hard. Those of us who enjoy programming and earn a living from it should hope that this cycle is not broken.
greyman 18y ago
Or, we are failing ourselves, but otherwise you are completely right. There is nothing in the article explaining why author thinks that "Object Oriented Programming has Failed Us". Anyway, this is a good way to trick Hacker News: 1. Write curious title with some programming term in it. 2. Write some random thoughts in the article body mentioning the term. 3. Submit to HN 4. Traffic!

greendestiny 18y ago

Object Orientation failed because it's too hard to understand? I blinked in incredulity. Object Orientation hasn't failed, but we're coming to appreciate its short comings as a sole design paradigm. For C programmers, C++ gave them access to variable execution via polymorphism (without ugly function pointers) and more flexible scoping via classes. In languages that provide first class and anonymous functions polymorphism is a lot less useful and closures provide better scoping flexibility than classes. Languages that have these features make it obvious how restrictive C++ is in binding this functionality in with the type system. In languages like ruby, python, javascript, lisp and smalltalk object orientation serves in its proper place as a type definition system and people use it appropriately. It's only C++ that has failed us.

timr 18y ago
"closures provide better scoping flexibility than classes. Languages that have these features make it obvious how restrictive C++ is in binding this functionality in with the type system." C++ can/does do anonymous functions (for example, see boost lambda), and can even give you most of what you want from first-class functions and closures (using functors). The parts that you don't get are due mostly to the fact that C++ doesn't have built-in garbage collection. It's a speed limitation, not a type-safety limitation. Now for my rant: there seems to be a backlash against type safety in this forum that I don't understand. Granted, if all you ever do is develop dinky webapps with your best friends, permissive languages allow for rapid development (mostly because they let you get away with murder). However, once you have more than a few developers and a few tens of thousand lines of code, the benefits of strict typing become rapidly apparent. The chaotic, free-for-all mentality of languages like Ruby is great for rapid prototyping, but it kinda sucks for developing in more formal scenarios. It may be "harder" to develop with strongly typed languages, but that's usually an indication that you're having to think a bit before you act. That's rarely a bad thing!
- greendestiny 18y ago
  Well templates do let you do just about everything being a meta-programming language - however libraries rarely use them and they are very complicated to implement yourself. I've not found static typing to be a big productivity win. I think it disallows a small subset of bugs. Like most people I've been a C++ programmer because it was the highest performance language with the best support for operating and window systems. I'm gleefully looking forward to it playing a smaller and smaller part of my programming work.

softwarejim 18y ago

I can't get passed the spelling and grammer mistakes personally

yan 18y ago
"I can't get passed the spelling and grammer mistakes personally" *grammar
- jraines 18y ago
  *past
  - Xichekolas 18y ago
    Now that is ironic.

aggieben 18y ago

I really hate to say this, as much as I like object oriented programming but, I really think we might be better off if we went back to procedural programming for the bulk of the applications that we write and left the object oriented stuff to people who really understand it and for problems that can not be solved any other way. Meanwhile, back at the lab, we need to come up with a programming environment that most people understand naturally. We need to do usability studies on the languages we develop just like we test applications we develop for users. Instead of trying to simplify what we are already doing, which continues to provide solutions that only programmers understand, we need to provide solutions that are no longer programmer centric. Isn't this what we used to call Visual Basic?

stcredzero 18y ago
It seems to be natural to do GUI-centric programming as in Visual Basic. People like attaching ideas to things that they can see. I think that the real problem is that there is an Impedance Mismatch between current GUIs and the domain. Once we have solved this, then the natural way to program won't conflict so drastically with good Object Oriented practices. I'm not sure if we can get there before we reach the level of GUIs in Minority Report, but I think we won't need quite all of that.

edw519 18y ago

"...and left the object oriented stuff to people who really understand it and for problems that can not be solved any other way." And an example of such a problem would be...? The single biggest problem with "language war" threads like this is that people actually believe this is the "only way". "Better way"? Maybe. "Only way"? Hardly. Anything you can do in your language (object oriented or not), I can do in mine. Maybe not as slick, but it can be done.

bporterfield 18y ago

I find it very hard to agree with thesis when there is absolutely no backing information about how OO programming is "hard". What are the difficulties people are having with OO? How can I take this article seriously when it's nothing more than a statement followed by some fluff followed by a few half-thought suggestions. Who are these 'people these people who 'really understand' OO programming? Am I one of them? Are you? How are we to know with no example of HOW OO is hard? What exactly is so hard about it? Class Apple extends Fruit. apple = new Apple(). apple.eat(). Makes sense to me. How are people using it wrong? Is the real issue that people don't understand when to use it? Here's a similar article: Playing poker is hard. A lot of people really don't understand how to play poker. People that play poker should stop, and start playing go fish. They should leave poker to the professionals that understand poker. All poker books should now become go fish books.