4 ms·

In summary, "Object Oriented Programming is good when you don't orient your program around objects."

by Kapura 6y ago

api 6y ago
That sounds snarky. Not sure if that was intended or not, but regardless I read your comment as: "OOP is good when you use the object oriented structure as a tool to organize your code and data to solve a problem, but not when you try to wrap your solution or your conception of the problem itself around OOP." It's 2020, and after 50+ years of programming language research I think it's safe to say that there is no "one language to rule them all" or "one programming paradigm to rule them all." Different approaches seem to excel in different areas. OOP seems to excel when the problem involves modeling systems with discrete parts and/or where there is a lot of state to manage. In other words I'd consider OOP for a "state-rich" problem domain. I am not saying this can only be done with OOP, just that it's a viable choice. There are multiple approaches to most problems. I'd also say that bad code tends to develop different forms of badness under different paradigms. Bad OOP code is massively over-engineered, verbose, and slow. Bad procedural code is spaghetti. Bad functional code is impenetrable "write-only code" that can only be understood by its author (maybe). Bad code in multi-paradigm languages tends to have all these forms of badness.
- grugagag 6y ago
  > I think it's safe to say that there is no "one language to rule them all" or "one programming paradigm to rule them all. Absolutely! But when OOP was initially sold to the masses it was marketed to be that one solution to rule them all, OOP was the buzzword of the day and it stayed like that for some time to come. It is only fair that the king was dethroned to make room for equally good/competing paradigms. I don't think OOP is bad but I've seen codebases where it become needlessly more complicated and complex than it should have been. The author is absolutely right in claiming that OOP is not bad if certain things are avoided when: objects are exactly not paralleling the real world, avoiding inheritance when not coding a framework/library, not creating objects unnecessarily, not overusing design patterns, etc. But since it was heavily marketed those things could not be easily escaped from and the OOP gurus kept on adding to the list. OOP is not bad but it deserve its bashing for the hype it took the world over with.
  - api 6y ago
    I agree about OOP being marketed that way. I remember that time. Rejecting it utterly and making it an "anti-buzzword" is equally irrational. It's a tool. Use it when appropriate.
    - grugagag 6y ago
      > It's a tool. Use it when appropriate. I agree it is a tool but since its definition (or multiple definitions because it appears there are many conflicted OOP philosophies out there) is not very clear and it leads to a lot of needlessly confused ways of using it. If it weren't so hyped in the first place maybe it would have evolved in a more harmonious way and it wouldn't be the subject to bashing now. I personally can use it for my projects, but I am in no way inclined to save it from bashing, it did bit me multiple times when my intuition was telling me otherwise. I guess what goes around comes around.
- Kapura 6y ago
  I program video games; I would consider running a real-time simulation as a "state-rich" problem domain. And the constraints of running real-time simulations mean that some implementations are not acceptable. Things are not generally allowed to be slow if they can be done in a way that is fast. Because of this, many game engines are built in a way that allows high throughput for processing the state of hundreds, perhaps thousands of entities in the world. Our guiding paradigm could be described as an entity-component system; another word used to describe it has been "data-oriented design." Here's a talk about it by the guy who was our engine director at the time[0]. It is not object oriented, and it seeks to unshackle itself from many of the issues with OOP as a guiding principal. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
  - garethrowlands 6y ago
    Absolutely. And the kinds of data structures you get in an entity-component system are probably easier and more natural to use in a language such as Haskell than a typical OOP object-graph-of-mutating-objects would be. Not that anyone's programming their ECS in Haskell.
- dnautics 6y ago
  > In other words I'd consider OOP for a "state-rich" problem domain Why is a paradigm like FP necessarily bad for this? Not all FPs are pure like Haskell, and some exist specifically for the purpose of managing state in sane ways (for example which tolerate concurrency without introducing bugs).
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Which FP languages do you think would be good for managing state? I've read here on HN the idea that FP is appropriate when you can think of your program like a pipe (data comes in, data goes out). To me, significant amounts of state would be antithetical to that. Is that view mistaken?
    - api 6y ago
      That's a good way to put it. I've thought of it as "FP is good if you can think of your program as a single possibly recursive data transform, even if it's a very elaborate one." AFAIK it is theoretically possible to model any program that way, but it's only convenient for some problems.
      - dnautics 6y ago
        That's really not true for most working fp-languages. For example Julia has support for fully mutable datastructures, which, you might expect for a language designed for high performance scientific computation first. In my experience (20 years of OO programming and 5 of fp)... Almost all programs are better modeled as data transformations (recursive or otherwise). One time I did come across a data structure where this did not work, but I was not convinced that the layout of the data structure itself was wisely designed (it was tied to a legacy Django ORM layout).
    - dnautics 6y ago
      Julia, erlang. Beyond some point you're using a DB for state anyways.
- jeffffff 6y ago
  i would make a distinction that data and state are two different things and argue that a lot of the mess people create with OOP is due to confusing the two. data is what exists externally to your program while state is strictly internal to your program. inputs and outputs of your program are data and not state by definition. applying OOP principles to data is an unmitigated disaster and is the source of most of the problems associated with bad OOP design. data should be modelled as plain structs and arrays. data should be trivially convertable to and from json. there should be no object/relational impedance mismatch because objects are not data. data should not be bundled with code. there should be no hidden information in data. there should be no inheritance in data (use composition instead). on the other hand, many of these principles are quite useful for encapsulating state in order to provide higher level abstractions. it makes sense to hide the internal implementation details of containers, synchronization constructs, database client libraries, and other abstractions, and to allow for multiple implementations of those abstractions which can be swapped out for different purposes. introducing a new abstraction should not be taken lightly and the vast majority of programs should not be introducing their own abstractions. if the abstraction isn't something you would put in a library and make use of in several other programs, it probably shouldn't exist. in this sense, i think it is fair to say that the article author's stance is that "OOP isn't bad but you probably shouldn't be using it", and that this is a perfectly reasonable statement to make. a lot of die-hard OOP fans would argue that this is not "real OOP" but ironically their dogmatism and inability to deal with ambiguity has done more to fuel the anti-OOP movement than anything else.
  - StanLindsey 6y ago
    I concur, at most state and data should be related is by viewing incoming data as your initial state. Data is immutable.

In summary, "Object Oriented Programming is good when you don't orient your program around objects."

by Kapura 6y ago

In summary, "Object Oriented Programming is good when you don't orient your program around objects."

api 6y ago

That sounds snarky. Not sure if that was intended or not, but regardless I read your comment as: "OOP is good when you use the object oriented structure as a tool to organize your code and data to solve a problem, but not when you try to wrap your solution or your conception of the problem itself around OOP." It's 2020, and after 50+ years of programming language research I think it's safe to say that there is no "one language to rule them all" or "one programming paradigm to rule them all." Different approaches seem to excel in different areas. OOP seems to excel when the problem involves modeling systems with discrete parts and/or where there is a lot of state to manage. In other words I'd consider OOP for a "state-rich" problem domain. I am not saying this can only be done with OOP, just that it's a viable choice. There are multiple approaches to most problems. I'd also say that bad code tends to develop different forms of badness under different paradigms. Bad OOP code is massively over-engineered, verbose, and slow. Bad procedural code is spaghetti. Bad functional code is impenetrable "write-only code" that can only be understood by its author (maybe). Bad code in multi-paradigm languages tends to have all these forms of badness.

grugagag 6y ago
> I think it's safe to say that there is no "one language to rule them all" or "one programming paradigm to rule them all. Absolutely! But when OOP was initially sold to the masses it was marketed to be that one solution to rule them all, OOP was the buzzword of the day and it stayed like that for some time to come. It is only fair that the king was dethroned to make room for equally good/competing paradigms. I don't think OOP is bad but I've seen codebases where it become needlessly more complicated and complex than it should have been. The author is absolutely right in claiming that OOP is not bad if certain things are avoided when: objects are exactly not paralleling the real world, avoiding inheritance when not coding a framework/library, not creating objects unnecessarily, not overusing design patterns, etc. But since it was heavily marketed those things could not be easily escaped from and the OOP gurus kept on adding to the list. OOP is not bad but it deserve its bashing for the hype it took the world over with.
- api 6y ago
  I agree about OOP being marketed that way. I remember that time. Rejecting it utterly and making it an "anti-buzzword" is equally irrational. It's a tool. Use it when appropriate.
  - grugagag 6y ago
    > It's a tool. Use it when appropriate. I agree it is a tool but since its definition (or multiple definitions because it appears there are many conflicted OOP philosophies out there) is not very clear and it leads to a lot of needlessly confused ways of using it. If it weren't so hyped in the first place maybe it would have evolved in a more harmonious way and it wouldn't be the subject to bashing now. I personally can use it for my projects, but I am in no way inclined to save it from bashing, it did bit me multiple times when my intuition was telling me otherwise. I guess what goes around comes around.
Kapura 6y ago
I program video games; I would consider running a real-time simulation as a "state-rich" problem domain. And the constraints of running real-time simulations mean that some implementations are not acceptable. Things are not generally allowed to be slow if they can be done in a way that is fast. Because of this, many game engines are built in a way that allows high throughput for processing the state of hundreds, perhaps thousands of entities in the world. Our guiding paradigm could be described as an entity-component system; another word used to describe it has been "data-oriented design." Here's a talk about it by the guy who was our engine director at the time[0]. It is not object oriented, and it seeks to unshackle itself from many of the issues with OOP as a guiding principal. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
- garethrowlands 6y ago
  Absolutely. And the kinds of data structures you get in an entity-component system are probably easier and more natural to use in a language such as Haskell than a typical OOP object-graph-of-mutating-objects would be. Not that anyone's programming their ECS in Haskell.
dnautics 6y ago
> In other words I'd consider OOP for a "state-rich" problem domain Why is a paradigm like FP necessarily bad for this? Not all FPs are pure like Haskell, and some exist specifically for the purpose of managing state in sane ways (for example which tolerate concurrency without introducing bugs).
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Which FP languages do you think would be good for managing state? I've read here on HN the idea that FP is appropriate when you can think of your program like a pipe (data comes in, data goes out). To me, significant amounts of state would be antithetical to that. Is that view mistaken?
  - api 6y ago
    That's a good way to put it. I've thought of it as "FP is good if you can think of your program as a single possibly recursive data transform, even if it's a very elaborate one." AFAIK it is theoretically possible to model any program that way, but it's only convenient for some problems.
    - dnautics 6y ago
      That's really not true for most working fp-languages. For example Julia has support for fully mutable datastructures, which, you might expect for a language designed for high performance scientific computation first. In my experience (20 years of OO programming and 5 of fp)... Almost all programs are better modeled as data transformations (recursive or otherwise). One time I did come across a data structure where this did not work, but I was not convinced that the layout of the data structure itself was wisely designed (it was tied to a legacy Django ORM layout).
  - dnautics 6y ago
    Julia, erlang. Beyond some point you're using a DB for state anyways.
jeffffff 6y ago
i would make a distinction that data and state are two different things and argue that a lot of the mess people create with OOP is due to confusing the two. data is what exists externally to your program while state is strictly internal to your program. inputs and outputs of your program are data and not state by definition. applying OOP principles to data is an unmitigated disaster and is the source of most of the problems associated with bad OOP design. data should be modelled as plain structs and arrays. data should be trivially convertable to and from json. there should be no object/relational impedance mismatch because objects are not data. data should not be bundled with code. there should be no hidden information in data. there should be no inheritance in data (use composition instead). on the other hand, many of these principles are quite useful for encapsulating state in order to provide higher level abstractions. it makes sense to hide the internal implementation details of containers, synchronization constructs, database client libraries, and other abstractions, and to allow for multiple implementations of those abstractions which can be swapped out for different purposes. introducing a new abstraction should not be taken lightly and the vast majority of programs should not be introducing their own abstractions. if the abstraction isn't something you would put in a library and make use of in several other programs, it probably shouldn't exist. in this sense, i think it is fair to say that the article author's stance is that "OOP isn't bad but you probably shouldn't be using it", and that this is a perfectly reasonable statement to make. a lot of die-hard OOP fans would argue that this is not "real OOP" but ironically their dogmatism and inability to deal with ambiguity has done more to fuel the anti-OOP movement than anything else.
- StanLindsey 6y ago
  I concur, at most state and data should be related is by viewing incoming data as your initial state. Data is immutable.