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I suspect "OOP" is teached like that most of the time. Or more precisely, this is teached as being OOP (as a fundamental distinguishing point from "procedural",

by temac 6y ago

I suspect "OOP" is teached like that most of the time. Or more precisely, this is teached as being OOP (as a fundamental distinguishing point from "procedural", most often -- ironically, the opposition "OOP" / "procedural" is then also complete garbage) I've yet to find a non boring, yet descriptive, consensual alternate definition of OOP; the first thought people have is more Java than Smalltalk, and if you exclude inheritance and everything virtual, then it boils down to syntactic sugar for single non-dynamic dispatch, and encapsulation. On the other (but still very sweet) hand, is Ruby OOP when you write 10.times { puts "hello" }? I don't know. Or rather: it's completely arbitrary. Even what is the most useful, when used cleanly is not exclusive of "OOP": invariants are also most important, and arguably way more well known by practitioners, in FP. Natural language is inherently descriptive. If there is a better "OOP", you just have to fight to make it prevail, so that people think of it when they hear "OOP". Maybe we can make the bad teachers stop in other ways too. Like not even using the word, and making "alternate" approaches (maybe even what you are calling OOP) fashionable.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
I think of OOP as encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism (but not necessarily all of them being used all of the time). My problem with the example is that Book should not have a sell() method. Instead, BookStore should have a sell(Book) method. The machinery for how to send in a credit card transaction does not belong in Book. You still need it - it has to live somewhere - but BookStore is the place, not Book.
- deleted 6y ago
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- jholman 6y ago
  > OOP as encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism Ugh. Polymorphism is far from unique to OO, and predates it. If by encapsulation you mean information hiding, that's as old as the birth of OO. I've also sometimes encountered an alternate definition of encapsulation that more or less means "information hiding in OO", which seems a bit circular to me? That doesn't mean OO can't have those features, but you didn't say "OOP usually includes loops and conditionals", because it's too obvious to mention.

by temac 6y ago

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

I think of OOP as encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism (but not necessarily all of them being used all of the time). My problem with the example is that Book should not have a sell() method. Instead, BookStore should have a sell(Book) method. The machinery for how to send in a credit card transaction does not belong in Book. You still need it - it has to live somewhere - but BookStore is the place, not Book.

deleted 6y ago
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jholman 6y ago
> OOP as encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism Ugh. Polymorphism is far from unique to OO, and predates it. If by encapsulation you mean information hiding, that's as old as the birth of OO. I've also sometimes encountered an alternate definition of encapsulation that more or less means "information hiding in OO", which seems a bit circular to me? That doesn't mean OO can't have those features, but you didn't say "OOP usually includes loops and conditionals", because it's too obvious to mention.