5 ms·

"Everyone" in this post is being defined as "Everyone in my extremely small tech bubble"

by _t0du 6y ago

throwaway894345 6y ago
Part of the problem is that “OOP” is poorly defined and lends itself to no-true-Scotsman arguments. If you criticize OOP for its characteristic use of inheritance, people retreat to “true OOP is about message passing” or “true OOP is about encapsulation” and “inheritance has nothing to do with OOP”. Feel free to replace “inheritance” with any criticism of OOP, such as the gratuitous use of mutability relative to other paradigms or the remarkable popularity of gratuitously large object graphs (the “banana with a reference to the gorilla holding it with a reference to the entire jungle” problem). Everyone insists their own definition of OOP is the one true definition, but none of these purely theoretical definitions absent any of the faults typically attributed to OOP actually exist in the real world (or perhaps they do exist and we just call them “data oriented programming” and “functional programming”).
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  For a parallel in a totally different domain, see Umberto Eco's definition of fascism [0]. It is a list of 14 properties typical of fascism, but it is not necessary to actually possess them all to be considered fascist (and they're mutually contradictory). The same thing happens with FP and OOP. Both are too broad to be defined concisely, and the definitions, when collected, are often contradictory or necessarily exclude what others would consider valid <paradigm> languages. Any discussion about these paradigms and their relative merit or "goodness" has to be clear about which subset of OOP and FP properties are being discussed and compared. An example: A popular view of many current FP proponents is the idea of immutability as a key requirement of FP. But this necessarily excludes Common Lisp, a multi-paradigm language with the ability to use many other FP ideas. Instead, CL would be included under FP (or include FP as one of its paradigms) by someone focusing on things like higher order functions, being able to construct functions at runtime via closures, etc. The same can be used to understand OO. Message passing is a property of some OO systems. Inheritance and class hierarchies are a property of others, possibly overlapping with the first. Closely tying methods to classes (see Java) is another common property. But Java and Smalltalk are both considered OO and both contain ideas absent in the other. Which of those ideas are OO, which are ancillary. And which OO ideas are present in one but absent in the other, does it invalidate the other language as an OO language or does it just mean it has a different view of OO? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto_Eco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto...
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I find it's more helpful to think about these labels as regions in a continuous multidimensional space. One such dimension is im/mutability, and you have languages like Haskell that exist on an extreme of that continuum and then languages like Java which exist nearer an opposite extreme in which mutability is common, and languages like CL where mutability is permitted but relatively infrequent. Similarly, another dimension is the frequency of inheritance, another is the aggregate cleanness or spaghetti-ness of object graphs (I'm sure there's a mathematical term for this), and so on. CL permits some mutability, but it pretty clearly belongs to the cluster that we typically call FP, and while definitions for FP do label slightly different but largely overlapping regions in this multidimensional space, there is relatively little variance. OOP on the other hand is very poorly defined. There is a tight little cluster of languages which are commonly called OOP, but the defining features of that cluster are generally negative so "OOP proponents" began arguing that while those languages are OOP, the things that unite them aren't actually defining characteristics of OOP. Advocating for other regions in this space for which to apply that label is problematic because they either exclude other traditionally-OO languages or the described region overlaps too much with the "functional" and "data-oriented" regions (one can retort, "per your definition, Haskell is also an OO language"). So in their loyalty to the term, "OOP" proponents instead make arguments about what doesn't define the language (note that not all proponents make all of these claims): * OOP may or may not involve inheritance. * OOP may or may not involve message passing. * OOP may or may not involve a high degree of spaghettiness in object graphs Ultimately they'd prefer the term be semantically useless than useful and negative. Ironically, the only thing that unites all OOP advocates is a fondness for the term. I do invite OOP proponents to prove me wrong by coming up with a common, semantically useful ("meaningful" in the formal sense of the term) definition that describes all traditionally-OO languages and generally excludes most data-oriented and functional languages. Note that a common rebuttal is that you can write bad code in any language and with any paradigm, which ignores that the claims are about the frequency and not a binary proposition about whether or not the language precludes a particular anti-pattern. The extent to which a Java program doesn't exhibit the criticisms above is the extent to which that program is not OOP, and very probably data-oriented or functional in nature.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Nobody does OOP anymore, it's too mainstream.

"Everyone" in this post is being defined as "Everyone in my extremely small tech bubble"

by _t0du 6y ago

"Everyone" in this post is being defined as "Everyone in my extremely small tech bubble"

Part of the problem is that “OOP” is poorly defined and lends itself to no-true-Scotsman arguments. If you criticize OOP for its characteristic use of inheritance, people retreat to “true OOP is about message passing” or “true OOP is about encapsulation” and “inheritance has nothing to do with OOP”. Feel free to replace “inheritance” with any criticism of OOP, such as the gratuitous use of mutability relative to other paradigms or the remarkable popularity of gratuitously large object graphs (the “banana with a reference to the gorilla holding it with a reference to the entire jungle” problem). Everyone insists their own definition of OOP is the one true definition, but none of these purely theoretical definitions absent any of the faults typically attributed to OOP actually exist in the real world (or perhaps they do exist and we just call them “data oriented programming” and “functional programming”).

Jtsummers 6y ago
For a parallel in a totally different domain, see Umberto Eco's definition of fascism [0]. It is a list of 14 properties typical of fascism, but it is not necessary to actually possess them all to be considered fascist (and they're mutually contradictory). The same thing happens with FP and OOP. Both are too broad to be defined concisely, and the definitions, when collected, are often contradictory or necessarily exclude what others would consider valid <paradigm> languages. Any discussion about these paradigms and their relative merit or "goodness" has to be clear about which subset of OOP and FP properties are being discussed and compared. An example: A popular view of many current FP proponents is the idea of immutability as a key requirement of FP. But this necessarily excludes Common Lisp, a multi-paradigm language with the ability to use many other FP ideas. Instead, CL would be included under FP (or include FP as one of its paradigms) by someone focusing on things like higher order functions, being able to construct functions at runtime via closures, etc. The same can be used to understand OO. Message passing is a property of some OO systems. Inheritance and class hierarchies are a property of others, possibly overlapping with the first. Closely tying methods to classes (see Java) is another common property. But Java and Smalltalk are both considered OO and both contain ideas absent in the other. Which of those ideas are OO, which are ancillary. And which OO ideas are present in one but absent in the other, does it invalidate the other language as an OO language or does it just mean it has a different view of OO? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto_Eco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto...
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I find it's more helpful to think about these labels as regions in a continuous multidimensional space. One such dimension is im/mutability, and you have languages like Haskell that exist on an extreme of that continuum and then languages like Java which exist nearer an opposite extreme in which mutability is common, and languages like CL where mutability is permitted but relatively infrequent. Similarly, another dimension is the frequency of inheritance, another is the aggregate cleanness or spaghetti-ness of object graphs (I'm sure there's a mathematical term for this), and so on. CL permits some mutability, but it pretty clearly belongs to the cluster that we typically call FP, and while definitions for FP do label slightly different but largely overlapping regions in this multidimensional space, there is relatively little variance. OOP on the other hand is very poorly defined. There is a tight little cluster of languages which are commonly called OOP, but the defining features of that cluster are generally negative so "OOP proponents" began arguing that while those languages are OOP, the things that unite them aren't actually defining characteristics of OOP. Advocating for other regions in this space for which to apply that label is problematic because they either exclude other traditionally-OO languages or the described region overlaps too much with the "functional" and "data-oriented" regions (one can retort, "per your definition, Haskell is also an OO language"). So in their loyalty to the term, "OOP" proponents instead make arguments about what doesn't define the language (note that not all proponents make all of these claims): * OOP may or may not involve inheritance. * OOP may or may not involve message passing. * OOP may or may not involve a high degree of spaghettiness in object graphs Ultimately they'd prefer the term be semantically useless than useful and negative. Ironically, the only thing that unites all OOP advocates is a fondness for the term. I do invite OOP proponents to prove me wrong by coming up with a common, semantically useful ("meaningful" in the formal sense of the term) definition that describes all traditionally-OO languages and generally excludes most data-oriented and functional languages. Note that a common rebuttal is that you can write bad code in any language and with any paradigm, which ignores that the claims are about the frequency and not a binary proposition about whether or not the language precludes a particular anti-pattern. The extent to which a Java program doesn't exhibit the criticisms above is the extent to which that program is not OOP, and very probably data-oriented or functional in nature.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

Nobody does OOP anymore, it's too mainstream.