9 ms·

A good reason, if any were needed, to escape from the Java OOP maze once and for all and never return. Honestly, talk about a mountain of incidental complexity.

• seadan83 3y ago
  Most of these exact same issues would be the same in C++, for sure similarly contrived examples could be contrived. > People, wake up! It doesn't have to be this way. You've been sold Java's absurd contortions dressed in the emperor's new clothes as the default by universities and big corps for decades. I think this is a very incorrect characterization. Effective Java was required reading for me in the very late 90s (decades ago). Back then it was even argued favor composition over inheritance [1]. AFAIK you'd have to go back to the 70s or 80s for inheritance to still have a good reputation (and which at the time was certainly better than a GOTO statement). The incidental complexity was later revealed to be quite profound, and a large chunk of "Effective Java" is dedicated to explaining these complexities and why and how to avoid these. [1] https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/java-inheritance-composition https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/java-inheritance-...
  • brazzy 3y ago
    Inheritance is still absolutely a good thing to leverage polymorphism - but for that all you need are simple, shallow inheritance hierarchies. What has a deservedly gotten a bad reputation are ivory tower architectures with deep inheritance hierarchies that lead to things like the Abstract Factory Pattern.
    • paulddraper 3y ago
      Abstract factory pattern isn't related to deep inheritance hierarchies.
• rootlocus 3y ago
  Between duck-typing languages like python and javascript and the minefiled that is C++, I think Java and C# fit a pretty nice sweet-spot. Java absolutely has "just data", they're mostly used for DTOs and database Entities, with tools like lombok @Data and `records` being some nice mechanisms of implementing them. Inheritance, when used for implementing is-a relationship, is a pretty powerful tool. If you're surprised by overriding, maybe instead of complaining about `Parent parent = new Child()` examples, try to see a `Writer writer = new PdfWriter()`. Are you still surprised that `writer.write(document)` generates a pdf? There are absolutely horrible ways of designing code in Java, but that can be said about any language.
  • whstl 3y ago
    That's a good point. But IME, when people complain about inheritance, they're primarily talking about implementation inheritance. Interface inheritance, used for polymorphism like in your example, is still considered a good practice and is not really criticized as much (an exception is when it is "abused" for other reasons, like in codebases that have one interface for every class, even without polymorphism).
    • UncleMeat 3y ago
      Eh, the meme has gotten so strong that I now see people say that subtyping in general is bad. It has escaped the gravity of concrete criticisms of implementation inheritance and morphed into a general “oop bad” thought system.
      • whstl 3y ago
        This is an uncharitable interpretation of the criticism. Several other programming paradigms also have subtyping, often more powerful than OOP, so people moving away from OOP are definitely doing some sort of subtyping in their own language and paradigm, unless they're going to some niche language... or Go. OOP criticism is often centered around two things: inheritance and state hiding via encapsulation. And this criticism often comes also from programmers that use OOP. And IMO it is pretty fair.