8 ms·

OO is not Computing, Newer is not More modern

47 points by hencjo 14y ago

marcusf 14y ago
I would like to meet one of these fantastical java-only OO-proponents that are often brought up in posts like this, claiming that Java and OO are the end-all of programming. To be honest, I never have. Some people seem to have a disposition to modeling problems with objects, but I fear I'm too young to have ever met any Java zealots. To me they seem more like straw men invented to help set up posts like this one.
- Ingaz 14y ago
  I've met a lot. Java, .NET, C++ guys. Sometimes it's hard to convince them that even particular OO-flavor is not the end of the road. C++ - guys thinking that OO in C++ is the best, java-guys thinking that extensions methods ruins OO in C#, all of them looking with horror in python. (Where's my private and protected??)
  - checkers 14y ago
    http://techiest.blogspot.com/ http://techiest.blogspot.com/
- richbradshaw 14y ago
  There are a lot of people who think like this. It does seem to be more enterprisey people generally who are working with large older codebases. I'm not sure how many people would design a product from ground up only using Java today.
  - UK-AL 14y ago
    Maybe people who don't care how trendy the language is? There are thousands of well tested, well maintained libraries for java mainly because of the funding from the corporate world. What was the first API for amazon aws in? Java. Nearly everything has Java API because it is so well supported. Java developers don't get off on, programming language one upmanship. Some people like being boring... SAP? Jave API. Oracle? Java APIs. Google Stuff? Java APIs. Android? Java APIs nearly every piece of commercial software has java apis. I remember having to use a 3rd party django paypal plugin and it was half broken(IPN callbacks), that would be unlikely with Java. Ended up faffing about in its source code to get it working.
    - Roritharr 14y ago
      Good point. Sometimes I ask myself why everyone thinks that Ruby Gems are so amazing. I've had all kinds of awesome Java Libs for years that work without much problems. Maven obviously isn't as nice as the way Ruby handles Gems, but to me it feels more structured.
    - icebraining 14y ago
      As far as I know, you could use those APIs with any JVM language, not just Java. There's Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Jython, JRuby and probably a few others.
      - ajdecon 14y ago
        True; but for random programmer off the street, these languages impose an additional cognitive load. For a given Java library, most of the example code and documentation will be geared to Java itself, and translating that to "another JVM language" isn't always trivial. Especially since most programmers out there are not polyglots, work in a big company, and may not even by "programmers" but just "engineer/accountant/business person who programs a bit".
  - pjmlp 14y ago
    Many people do. What is the business value for rewriting the code in the flavor of the month language? In what sense does it improve profit?
- option_greek 14y ago
  You should get interviewed for enterprise jobs sometime. It's all about objects, patterns and lots of factories... some times makes me wonder if we intentionally make stuff complex to find meaning in what we do.
- groovy2shoes 14y ago
  There are a lot of Java-only OO-proponents in the corporate world.
  - babarock 14y ago
    Agreed with parent. Come take a stroll in my office; I work in a coporate bank. Most of my coworkers learned "real" programming in the 90s, when Java was the hot new thing on the block. To most of them, the whole Programming Language eco-system can be summarized to an endless "C++ vs Java vs C#" flamewar. Just yesterday a colleague of mine looked at me with chock and awe when I told him I enjoy coding in C. "But... it's not OO!" he mumbled, puzzled. Pushing the caricature a little further, Python and Ruby are toy languages that only hipsters use, Perl is only to be used by the sysadmin down the hall, and Lisp is the biggest failed experiment programmers ever came up with. Pointy-haired bosses encourage this kind of thinking: They would never get in trouble for chosing a language amongst the big 3 (C++/C#/Java). I once heard someone say: "I don't understand why there are still new languages coming out every day. Shouldn't everyone just use Java?"
    - jasonlotito 14y ago
      > can be summarized to an endless "C++ vs Java vs C#" flamewar. As opposed to an endless "Ruby vs Python vs PHP" flamewar? Pushing the caricature a little futher, C++ and Java are enterprise languages that only old out-of-touch programmers use. Hipster Apple-using kids encourage this kind of thinking: They would never be un-cool for choosing a language among Ruby, Python, or Lisp. It's far too easy to become that type of programmer. Choice of language has little to do with it. No doubt you understand this, just making the point clear.
      - babarock 14y ago
        You sir made my day, thank you very much!
  - arunmur 14y ago
    There are equally large number of people who hate Java for no good reasons. Its all the effect of "Once a fan boy always a fan boy".
- huggyface 14y ago
  Almost all of the observations you read on programmer blogs are summarized in this academic piece - http://www.theonion.com/articles/sociologist-considers-own-behavior-indicative-of-l,421/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/sociologist-considers-own-b... [Aside - I had a faint memory of that article, having only read it when it first came out, but managed to find it via a domain-filtered search with cognac and trend, the only two words I could remember from the article. Thought that memory cluster was humorous] Usually it's someone responding to some personal issue with a public post. Perhaps they argued with a peer. I also found it to be a serious mental bender to see OO and Java called "new", relative to "old". In most programming groups Java is the new Cobol, considered anything but new. Often it is a legacy language.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    Strangely, Java is a legacy language, but also the lingua franca of the largest, most prestigious tech companies.
    - huggyface 14y ago
      Such as? It certainly isn't at Microsoft. Nor at Apple. Nor at Amazon, or Facebook, or LinkedIn or Twitter. Android made a big mistake of throwing in with Java originally (as the project originated as a decoupled version of J2ME, as such was the thing at the time), and Google has a preponderance of Javaheads internally, perhaps explaining their continued reinvention of new languages. Oracle likes Java, but that's because their products are largely code produced over a decade ago.
      - pjmlp 14y ago
        Java at LinkedIn http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/08/linkedin-data-infrastructure http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/08/linkedin-data-infrastructu... Java at Twitter http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/04/twitter-drops-ruby-for-java.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/04/twitter-drops-ruby... Java at Facebook http://www.infoq.com/presentations/HBase-at-Facebook http://www.infoq.com/presentations/HBase-at-Facebook Java at Amazon http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/ http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/
- arethuza 14y ago
  I was a total Java zealot from about '95 to about '00 when I was pretty much your standard architecture astronaut in a startup environment (back when Java was "cool"). Totally reformed now - I hope.
- reitzensteinm 14y ago
  I went to university starting 2004 for an electrical engineering degree, and our programming classes were basically structured around OO Java as a panacea. Later in life, listening to the Berkeley SICP lectures made me realize what a joke the whole thing was. I don't think Java OO zealots are a straw man. I think they're very common, and many of us are living in a happy Hacker News and startup bubble, where people we meet are surprisingly competent.
  - UK-AL 14y ago
    SICP/Scheme is usually taught as a first language(To blow their mind) for cs students, then eventually they get taught Java anyway at most universities...
    - paxswill 14y ago
      Not in my experience. C++ is taught at my school, and a mix of C++ and Java is used at most (all?) the other schools in my state as the intro language. Even MIT, the source of SICP/Scheme, is using Python for its intro language. It's only much later are you exposed to other languages (at my school, Java, ML and Prolog are explicitly covered).
      - UK-AL 14y ago
        Maybe I should state. Most schools that USE SICP/Scheme use it as introductory language. Most don't however. MIT has only recently moved to python. That introduction course used to be Scheme based which converted to python. I believe they have a optional scheme course now.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      This is not very accurate. SCIP in [yesterday Scheme, today Python] is taught first to MIT students (where SCIP comes from). Some universities follow MIT but most do not; I don't think there are many schools actually using SCIP at the high end, maybe some lower end schools trying to emulate MIT in order to capture their greatness (rarely works from what I hear). Example: U of Washington CSE 142 (the entry level course for one of America's better programs) starts with Java and continues that through 143.
- ajuc 14y ago
  When I was at university (early '00) the default opinion was that OO is the way to go, and everything other is obsolete or esoteric. I thought that way then, too. I remember complaining with my friends to teacher that he teaches us algorithms and data structures in procedural Turbo Pascal, when everybody knows it's obsolete, and we should be doing everything in C++ or Java. Yeah, I was clueless, and that particular prof. was right. But most teachers were OO fundamentalists, and it was assumed everything should be OO. One stupid exercise - design system to keep data about students and teachers on university, using OO. And the answer was obviously - Student and Teacher class extending Person class. No matter that sometimes people are studying on 2 facoulties, sometimes Student is also a Teacher, or becomes Teacher after he graduates. And when we could use relational DB, it was always with ORM, because objects are needed in any modern system.
  - UK-AL 14y ago
    "Student is also a Teacher, or becomes Teacher after he graduates" - That's the result of not using composition... "No matter that sometimes people are studying on 2 facoulties" -- Why doesn't this work? Just use a collection, several students inside a collection object... "And when we could use relational DB, it was always with ORM, because objects are needed in any modern system." - Because you manually want to populate objects with tons of boilerplate? Just sounds like results of bad design in general, not OO...
    - jerf 14y ago
      "That's the result of not using composition..." Historically, OO's acceptance of composition over inheritance only came after a decade of experience that showed inheritance doesn't work as promised. (Or two decades, depending on your accounting.) Composition as an answer came later. "Just use a collection, several students inside a collection object..." So, embed an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a relational database in OO and its problems go away? I've found some places where OO works (the traditional UI widgets still tend to work pretty well), but it isn't even close to a panacea and if you compare the initial promises to what it can actually deliver, history has not treated it that well.
- rbanffy 14y ago
  Go to LinkedIn, search for Java in jobs around you, find the ones that look more boring and apply. Enjoy the perplexity when you offer a non-OO solution to a problem.
  - v0cab 14y ago
    Depends on how old you are perhaps? I remember being told that my way would work but wasn't OO enough, and because of that it was wrong i.e. I hadn't done well on that portion of the interview.
    - rbanffy 14y ago
      The older you are, the more likely it is that you were presented to other ideas before - and that can help you contextualize object orientation. I learned OOP in the late 80's with Smalltalk/V, used Actor (an Algol-ish ST-workalike), but the first computer I ever programmed was a Sinclair ZX-81 clone (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=910&st=1 http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=910&s...), quickly moving on to an Apple II clone (http://www.homecomputer.de/pages/f_info.html?cce_Exato_Pro.html http://www.homecomputer.de/pages/f_info.html?cce_Exato_Pro.h...). So, before my first contact with OO, I learned BASIC, 6502 assembly, FORTRAN, GraFORTH, C (on QNX!), some Pascal (Turbo on CP/M), a little bit of Lisp (and I ran away from it). Dijkstra would consider me hopeless.
  - gbog 14y ago
    Would be interesting to know what non-OO means precisely. I am reading SICP right now and a bit confused: functional programming is not newer, nor more powerful. It just easier to debug. (It seems)
    - rbanffy 14y ago
      I once saw a "Library" class with lots of public static methods. That's as non-OO as it gets when you are writing Java code. The worst part about it is that it actually made sense. You don't want your Order class to worry about localizing dates and you don't want to clutter your glue code with Java's cruel date/time system either. You also don't want to make yet another subclass of a date/time and glue it to your ORM.
- stonemetal 14y ago
  I work with one, it isn't hard to get him to start the this isn't OO it is complete and utter crap routine. To be fair to him though we just inherited a large code base of low quality. He turns out good code, but is mostly a 501 programmer.
- batista 14y ago
  >I would like to meet one of these fantastical java-only OO-proponents that are often brought up in posts like this, claiming that Java and OO are the end-all of programming. To be honest, I never have. Strange, because I have met many of them. As well as many VB jockeys, who would look at you with a blank stare if you mentioned either OO or functional programing. Maybe you should work in bad companies more ;-)
- epo 14y ago
  So what you're saying is you are too young to have a real opinion about the article because you don't have enough experience. Instead you invent a strawman to attack some other alleged strawmen
ericHosick 14y ago
I've been looking into different software engineering methodologies and it seems that all of them rely on specialization. I think this leads to un-necessary complexity. OOP might not be more modern but I think it was trying to move into the direction of less specialization. Unfortunately, it has gotten side tracked.
fauigerzigerk 14y ago
"Lots of so called object oriented languages have setters and when you have an setter on an object you turned it back into a data structure." That may be because data structures is what we actually need. Data structures largely determine the computational complexity of operations and I think it makes little sense to act as if we could always think in terms of abstract responsibilities, interfaces, encapsulation, message passing, etc. These things are useful organizational principles for coping with large systems, but at the core of most large systems is some algorithmic transformation of one data structure into another.
- xyzzyz 14y ago
  I think that the point here is that while data structures are objects, not every object should act like a data structure.
  - fauigerzigerk 14y ago
    That's a much better way of putting it than the original quote.
  - groovy2shoes 14y ago
    Keep in mind that when Alan Kay says "object" he means something different from programmers-at-large. To the general population of programmers, an object is just a data structure that's been bundled with some behavior. To Kay, an object is a computational entity that can only send/receive messages (what Carl Hewitt called an actor even before Smalltalk was on the scene). In Kay's mind, objects do not expose state the way they commonly do in the mainstream.
officialchicken 14y ago
Modernism (bauhaus/destijl) is about 100 years old. Why is it so hard to understand that there is an implicit set of limitations based on the tools (and/or materials) we use in our projects? Think skyscraper... now think wooden skyscraper.
16s 14y ago
That's why I like C++ so much. It doesn't force OO down your throat. It lets you program using whatever style is best suited for the job.
- v0cab 14y ago
  That's why I like C so much.
  - UK-AL 14y ago
    Yeah, but in C you end up creating your own data structures from scratch every time. You can use data structure libraries, but without generics or something similar, it makes it difficult.... Then sometimes actually getting a external c libary to build(If it's not in the package manager) is sometimes trouble. ./configure ./make usually ends up in some obsercure error or depedency... C++ usually makes the errors even more unreadable...
    - v0cab 14y ago
      > in C you end up creating your own data structures from scratch every time. You can use data structure libraries, but without generics or something similar, it makes it difficult.... Hmm... I never ran into too many problems with this myself, but it could just be outside of my experience. Can't TYPEDEFs help with this? Also, better to have the code to step through, rather than decrypting STL/template compiler errors, no? And what's the harm in a bit of repetition of code structures? > Then sometimes actually getting a external c libary to build(If it's not in the package manager) is sometimes trouble. ./configure ./make usually ends up in some obsercure error or depedency... C++ usually makes the errors even more unreadable... C++ is the main thing I'm comparing C to. Yes, sorting out dependencies isn't fun.
    - xyzzyz 14y ago
      Array is good enough data structure for most uses, and Yeah, but in C you end up creating your own data structures from scratch every time. is not true.
guard-of-terra 14y ago
"ORMs are newer and hipper than those old boring outdated relational databases?" I stopped reading after this point since author obviously doesn't understand what he's talking about.
- fauigerzigerk 14y ago
  What does he not understand?
  - esteth 14y ago
    an ORM is a library to map objects onto a relational database. They're not a substitute for databases themselves, but a substitute for a DB interaction library. ie: To use an ORM you must use a relational database. Things like mongoose exist, but they're not ORMs since they don't map objects to a relational database.
    - fauigerzigerk 14y ago
      I see what you mean. I thought he was mocking the idea of wrapping the old uncool relational model in a fashionable new OO API. What is substituted is not the relational DBMS but the relational model. ORMs are supposed to let you think in terms of objects instead of sets of tuples.
      - UK-AL 14y ago
        No, turns out most sql work involves extracting data from the resulting sql statement into objects. So you don't end up passing 5 params from the sql result everywhere. ORMs do these automatically, and go beyond.
        fauigerzigerk 14y ago
        That's true for some basic CRUD operations and that's what ORMs should be used for. But people tend to just blindly copy everything into an object model and perform operations on those objects that could just as well have been done in a set oriented way with a lot less code causing a lot less network traffic. Obviously there are scalability downsides and not everything is easier to express in terms of sets, so I try to be pragmatic. You can of course do set operations through an ORM but that's not its purpose and the performance implications are sometimes tricky.
swalsh 14y ago
Most of object oriented programming to me feels like nothing more than trying to decide the best place to put something. As time goes on though, typically the 3rd iteration, there just is no good place to put this new thing. A redesign would be best, but I only have 1 week to finish this new feature. So a project (well at least in my experience) progresses like this: "Wonderful architecture" > "glad I designed this project well, its' paying dividends!" > "hmmmm I never considered this paradigm before" > "new guy joins team" > "argh this code is crap" Object oriented programming can be really elegant... but I can see why people hate on it.
- hackinthebochs 14y ago
  I think you summed it up well. People hate object oriented code because it has an extra startup burden. It's hard to just dive in and start fiddling with code because there are many project-specific abstractions you need to understand before-hand. The new guy on the project has to spend extra time to "grok" the idioms of the project. I personally don't see this as a bad thing. The fact is, abstraction is key to programming. People who have a hard time managing extra abstractions in their head probably aren't nearly as good of a programmer as they think.
  - tetha 14y ago
    On the other hand, people complaining about this don't realize it is very much the same in any other language. Go ahead and just fiddle around in that million loc c codebase. Or that million loc java codebase. (and ignore for a second that that c codebase is a large compiler and that java codebase is an elaborate hello world). Or a hypothetical million line haskell codebase. In C you have to understand modules, functions working on structures and functions controlling the architecture. In Java you have to understand class hierachies and classes or functions managing the control flow. In haskell, you have to understand abstract data types, type classes and monads and functions managing control flow.
richieb 14y ago
Java is a new language? It's been around for 15 years or so. OO is even older - goes back to Simula 67 and Smalltalk in late 70s....
seanmcdirmid 14y ago
OO gets a bad rap, it is incredibly useful in applying ontology to program structuring. Yes, OOP in Java isn't ideal, but if you look at more pure OOP languages like Smalltalk or Self, its virtues really do begin to shine through. FP is great when expressing computations, but we often are just gluing nominal entities together, where OOP excels over FP. I like to have a few FP options in my languages (C#, LINQ), but my mind is firmly rooted in objects when it comes to overall macro design of the program.
- ajuc 14y ago
  OO is great for systems, where you have real objects, and only care about their current state. In effect - for simulations, games, such stuff. In most systems - changes over time, archival data, and relations between objects are important. And with OO it's ugly to keep them. You end up implementing relational db backed by object collections. And your nice objects instead of representing nouns (Employee, etc.), start representing relations (Employement, etc.). So people use relational db with ORMs and load everything from database into objects only to show window/edit data, call one or 2 methods on these objects, and save data back into database. All this ceremony to write employee.giveRaise(raise) instead of giveRaise(employee, raise).
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    And yet this problem kind of goes away in a key value or graph database. I wonder if the ORM mismatch is often not one of objects getting in the way, but one of using relational in the first place. At anyrate, how you manage your objects (for things like search) is ideally orthogonal to the objects themselves; though this is difficult to accomplish in practice. I use objects in reactive (non-persistent/DB) systems all the time. Objects aren't the problem, but you do have to manage your dependencies dynamically by tracing/dirtying/and cleaning. Objects actually excel at encapsulating and managing state, it is much harder to do this with functions (see all the work on functional-reactive programming).
    - ajuc 14y ago
      Hm, I've never used key-value/graph datastore, and it seems I need to. Is there something like selects with joins for graph nodes? How do you represent changes in objects over time?
stitchy 14y ago
I'm interested in what alternatives that the author has for the Object Oriented "zealots." I'm assuming that his alternative is a functional language. Personally, I think that functional languages are great, but I don't think that's any reason to flame Java/C++/C#. These are great tools. They were created for specific reasons, and they can certainly be used in efficient ways. Of course, they can also be horribly abused. I don't think that it's fair to say that any particular language is the end-all be-all for development. You have to pick the right tool for the job.
rbanffy 14y ago
So, when Alan Kay implies Java damages the brain, he is quoted. When I say it, I get downvoted. Do I see a double standard here? BTW, I learned to program on a Texas (TI-55) calculator. What symptoms should I be presenting? ;-)
- minikomi 14y ago
  RSI, perhaps?
  - rbanffy 14y ago
    Any age-related condition would be a fair guess ;-)
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
Objects are a poor man's closure. Closures are a poor man's object. Objects are a poor man's first-class module, and so are closures. First-class modules are a poor man's type-class. Type-classes are a poor man's first-class module. Hail, Torat Exists, the holy teachings of the existential type!

47 points by hencjo 14y ago

I would like to meet one of these fantastical java-only OO-proponents that are often brought up in posts like this, claiming that Java and OO are the end-all of programming. To be honest, I never have. Some people seem to have a disposition to modeling problems with objects, but I fear I'm too young to have ever met any Java zealots. To me they seem more like straw men invented to help set up posts like this one.

Ingaz 14y ago
I've met a lot. Java, .NET, C++ guys. Sometimes it's hard to convince them that even particular OO-flavor is not the end of the road. C++ - guys thinking that OO in C++ is the best, java-guys thinking that extensions methods ruins OO in C#, all of them looking with horror in python. (Where's my private and protected??)
- checkers 14y ago
  http://techiest.blogspot.com/ http://techiest.blogspot.com/
richbradshaw 14y ago
There are a lot of people who think like this. It does seem to be more enterprisey people generally who are working with large older codebases. I'm not sure how many people would design a product from ground up only using Java today.
- UK-AL 14y ago
  Maybe people who don't care how trendy the language is? There are thousands of well tested, well maintained libraries for java mainly because of the funding from the corporate world. What was the first API for amazon aws in? Java. Nearly everything has Java API because it is so well supported. Java developers don't get off on, programming language one upmanship. Some people like being boring... SAP? Jave API. Oracle? Java APIs. Google Stuff? Java APIs. Android? Java APIs nearly every piece of commercial software has java apis. I remember having to use a 3rd party django paypal plugin and it was half broken(IPN callbacks), that would be unlikely with Java. Ended up faffing about in its source code to get it working.
  - Roritharr 14y ago
    Good point. Sometimes I ask myself why everyone thinks that Ruby Gems are so amazing. I've had all kinds of awesome Java Libs for years that work without much problems. Maven obviously isn't as nice as the way Ruby handles Gems, but to me it feels more structured.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    As far as I know, you could use those APIs with any JVM language, not just Java. There's Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Jython, JRuby and probably a few others.
    - ajdecon 14y ago
      True; but for random programmer off the street, these languages impose an additional cognitive load. For a given Java library, most of the example code and documentation will be geared to Java itself, and translating that to "another JVM language" isn't always trivial. Especially since most programmers out there are not polyglots, work in a big company, and may not even by "programmers" but just "engineer/accountant/business person who programs a bit".
- pjmlp 14y ago
  Many people do. What is the business value for rewriting the code in the flavor of the month language? In what sense does it improve profit?
option_greek 14y ago
You should get interviewed for enterprise jobs sometime. It's all about objects, patterns and lots of factories... some times makes me wonder if we intentionally make stuff complex to find meaning in what we do.
groovy2shoes 14y ago
There are a lot of Java-only OO-proponents in the corporate world.
- babarock 14y ago
  Agreed with parent. Come take a stroll in my office; I work in a coporate bank. Most of my coworkers learned "real" programming in the 90s, when Java was the hot new thing on the block. To most of them, the whole Programming Language eco-system can be summarized to an endless "C++ vs Java vs C#" flamewar. Just yesterday a colleague of mine looked at me with chock and awe when I told him I enjoy coding in C. "But... it's not OO!" he mumbled, puzzled. Pushing the caricature a little further, Python and Ruby are toy languages that only hipsters use, Perl is only to be used by the sysadmin down the hall, and Lisp is the biggest failed experiment programmers ever came up with. Pointy-haired bosses encourage this kind of thinking: They would never get in trouble for chosing a language amongst the big 3 (C++/C#/Java). I once heard someone say: "I don't understand why there are still new languages coming out every day. Shouldn't everyone just use Java?"
  - jasonlotito 14y ago
    > can be summarized to an endless "C++ vs Java vs C#" flamewar. As opposed to an endless "Ruby vs Python vs PHP" flamewar? Pushing the caricature a little futher, C++ and Java are enterprise languages that only old out-of-touch programmers use. Hipster Apple-using kids encourage this kind of thinking: They would never be un-cool for choosing a language among Ruby, Python, or Lisp. It's far too easy to become that type of programmer. Choice of language has little to do with it. No doubt you understand this, just making the point clear.
    - babarock 14y ago
      You sir made my day, thank you very much!
- arunmur 14y ago
  There are equally large number of people who hate Java for no good reasons. Its all the effect of "Once a fan boy always a fan boy".
huggyface 14y ago
Almost all of the observations you read on programmer blogs are summarized in this academic piece - http://www.theonion.com/articles/sociologist-considers-own-behavior-indicative-of-l,421/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/sociologist-considers-own-b... [Aside - I had a faint memory of that article, having only read it when it first came out, but managed to find it via a domain-filtered search with cognac and trend, the only two words I could remember from the article. Thought that memory cluster was humorous] Usually it's someone responding to some personal issue with a public post. Perhaps they argued with a peer. I also found it to be a serious mental bender to see OO and Java called "new", relative to "old". In most programming groups Java is the new Cobol, considered anything but new. Often it is a legacy language.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  Strangely, Java is a legacy language, but also the lingua franca of the largest, most prestigious tech companies.
  - huggyface 14y ago
    Such as? It certainly isn't at Microsoft. Nor at Apple. Nor at Amazon, or Facebook, or LinkedIn or Twitter. Android made a big mistake of throwing in with Java originally (as the project originated as a decoupled version of J2ME, as such was the thing at the time), and Google has a preponderance of Javaheads internally, perhaps explaining their continued reinvention of new languages. Oracle likes Java, but that's because their products are largely code produced over a decade ago.
    - pjmlp 14y ago
      Java at LinkedIn http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/08/linkedin-data-infrastructure http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/08/linkedin-data-infrastructu... Java at Twitter http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/04/twitter-drops-ruby-for-java.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/04/twitter-drops-ruby... Java at Facebook http://www.infoq.com/presentations/HBase-at-Facebook http://www.infoq.com/presentations/HBase-at-Facebook Java at Amazon http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/ http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/
arethuza 14y ago
I was a total Java zealot from about '95 to about '00 when I was pretty much your standard architecture astronaut in a startup environment (back when Java was "cool"). Totally reformed now - I hope.
reitzensteinm 14y ago
I went to university starting 2004 for an electrical engineering degree, and our programming classes were basically structured around OO Java as a panacea. Later in life, listening to the Berkeley SICP lectures made me realize what a joke the whole thing was. I don't think Java OO zealots are a straw man. I think they're very common, and many of us are living in a happy Hacker News and startup bubble, where people we meet are surprisingly competent.
- UK-AL 14y ago
  SICP/Scheme is usually taught as a first language(To blow their mind) for cs students, then eventually they get taught Java anyway at most universities...
  - paxswill 14y ago
    Not in my experience. C++ is taught at my school, and a mix of C++ and Java is used at most (all?) the other schools in my state as the intro language. Even MIT, the source of SICP/Scheme, is using Python for its intro language. It's only much later are you exposed to other languages (at my school, Java, ML and Prolog are explicitly covered).
    - UK-AL 14y ago
      Maybe I should state. Most schools that USE SICP/Scheme use it as introductory language. Most don't however. MIT has only recently moved to python. That introduction course used to be Scheme based which converted to python. I believe they have a optional scheme course now.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    This is not very accurate. SCIP in [yesterday Scheme, today Python] is taught first to MIT students (where SCIP comes from). Some universities follow MIT but most do not; I don't think there are many schools actually using SCIP at the high end, maybe some lower end schools trying to emulate MIT in order to capture their greatness (rarely works from what I hear). Example: U of Washington CSE 142 (the entry level course for one of America's better programs) starts with Java and continues that through 143.
ajuc 14y ago
When I was at university (early '00) the default opinion was that OO is the way to go, and everything other is obsolete or esoteric. I thought that way then, too. I remember complaining with my friends to teacher that he teaches us algorithms and data structures in procedural Turbo Pascal, when everybody knows it's obsolete, and we should be doing everything in C++ or Java. Yeah, I was clueless, and that particular prof. was right. But most teachers were OO fundamentalists, and it was assumed everything should be OO. One stupid exercise - design system to keep data about students and teachers on university, using OO. And the answer was obviously - Student and Teacher class extending Person class. No matter that sometimes people are studying on 2 facoulties, sometimes Student is also a Teacher, or becomes Teacher after he graduates. And when we could use relational DB, it was always with ORM, because objects are needed in any modern system.
- UK-AL 14y ago
  "Student is also a Teacher, or becomes Teacher after he graduates" - That's the result of not using composition... "No matter that sometimes people are studying on 2 facoulties" -- Why doesn't this work? Just use a collection, several students inside a collection object... "And when we could use relational DB, it was always with ORM, because objects are needed in any modern system." - Because you manually want to populate objects with tons of boilerplate? Just sounds like results of bad design in general, not OO...
  - jerf 14y ago
    "That's the result of not using composition..." Historically, OO's acceptance of composition over inheritance only came after a decade of experience that showed inheritance doesn't work as promised. (Or two decades, depending on your accounting.) Composition as an answer came later. "Just use a collection, several students inside a collection object..." So, embed an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a relational database in OO and its problems go away? I've found some places where OO works (the traditional UI widgets still tend to work pretty well), but it isn't even close to a panacea and if you compare the initial promises to what it can actually deliver, history has not treated it that well.
rbanffy 14y ago
Go to LinkedIn, search for Java in jobs around you, find the ones that look more boring and apply. Enjoy the perplexity when you offer a non-OO solution to a problem.
- v0cab 14y ago
  Depends on how old you are perhaps? I remember being told that my way would work but wasn't OO enough, and because of that it was wrong i.e. I hadn't done well on that portion of the interview.
  - rbanffy 14y ago
    The older you are, the more likely it is that you were presented to other ideas before - and that can help you contextualize object orientation. I learned OOP in the late 80's with Smalltalk/V, used Actor (an Algol-ish ST-workalike), but the first computer I ever programmed was a Sinclair ZX-81 clone (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=910&st=1 http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=910&s...), quickly moving on to an Apple II clone (http://www.homecomputer.de/pages/f_info.html?cce_Exato_Pro.html http://www.homecomputer.de/pages/f_info.html?cce_Exato_Pro.h...). So, before my first contact with OO, I learned BASIC, 6502 assembly, FORTRAN, GraFORTH, C (on QNX!), some Pascal (Turbo on CP/M), a little bit of Lisp (and I ran away from it). Dijkstra would consider me hopeless.
- gbog 14y ago
  Would be interesting to know what non-OO means precisely. I am reading SICP right now and a bit confused: functional programming is not newer, nor more powerful. It just easier to debug. (It seems)
  - rbanffy 14y ago
    I once saw a "Library" class with lots of public static methods. That's as non-OO as it gets when you are writing Java code. The worst part about it is that it actually made sense. You don't want your Order class to worry about localizing dates and you don't want to clutter your glue code with Java's cruel date/time system either. You also don't want to make yet another subclass of a date/time and glue it to your ORM.
stonemetal 14y ago
I work with one, it isn't hard to get him to start the this isn't OO it is complete and utter crap routine. To be fair to him though we just inherited a large code base of low quality. He turns out good code, but is mostly a 501 programmer.
batista 14y ago
>I would like to meet one of these fantastical java-only OO-proponents that are often brought up in posts like this, claiming that Java and OO are the end-all of programming. To be honest, I never have. Strange, because I have met many of them. As well as many VB jockeys, who would look at you with a blank stare if you mentioned either OO or functional programing. Maybe you should work in bad companies more ;-)
epo 14y ago
So what you're saying is you are too young to have a real opinion about the article because you don't have enough experience. Instead you invent a strawman to attack some other alleged strawmen

ericHosick 14y ago

I've been looking into different software engineering methodologies and it seems that all of them rely on specialization. I think this leads to un-necessary complexity. OOP might not be more modern but I think it was trying to move into the direction of less specialization. Unfortunately, it has gotten side tracked.

fauigerzigerk 14y ago

"Lots of so called object oriented languages have setters and when you have an setter on an object you turned it back into a data structure." That may be because data structures is what we actually need. Data structures largely determine the computational complexity of operations and I think it makes little sense to act as if we could always think in terms of abstract responsibilities, interfaces, encapsulation, message passing, etc. These things are useful organizational principles for coping with large systems, but at the core of most large systems is some algorithmic transformation of one data structure into another.

xyzzyz 14y ago
I think that the point here is that while data structures are objects, not every object should act like a data structure.
- fauigerzigerk 14y ago
  That's a much better way of putting it than the original quote.
- groovy2shoes 14y ago
  Keep in mind that when Alan Kay says "object" he means something different from programmers-at-large. To the general population of programmers, an object is just a data structure that's been bundled with some behavior. To Kay, an object is a computational entity that can only send/receive messages (what Carl Hewitt called an actor even before Smalltalk was on the scene). In Kay's mind, objects do not expose state the way they commonly do in the mainstream.

officialchicken 14y ago

Modernism (bauhaus/destijl) is about 100 years old. Why is it so hard to understand that there is an implicit set of limitations based on the tools (and/or materials) we use in our projects? Think skyscraper... now think wooden skyscraper.

16s 14y ago

That's why I like C++ so much. It doesn't force OO down your throat. It lets you program using whatever style is best suited for the job.

v0cab 14y ago
That's why I like C so much.
- UK-AL 14y ago
  Yeah, but in C you end up creating your own data structures from scratch every time. You can use data structure libraries, but without generics or something similar, it makes it difficult.... Then sometimes actually getting a external c libary to build(If it's not in the package manager) is sometimes trouble. ./configure ./make usually ends up in some obsercure error or depedency... C++ usually makes the errors even more unreadable...
  - v0cab 14y ago
    > in C you end up creating your own data structures from scratch every time. You can use data structure libraries, but without generics or something similar, it makes it difficult.... Hmm... I never ran into too many problems with this myself, but it could just be outside of my experience. Can't TYPEDEFs help with this? Also, better to have the code to step through, rather than decrypting STL/template compiler errors, no? And what's the harm in a bit of repetition of code structures? > Then sometimes actually getting a external c libary to build(If it's not in the package manager) is sometimes trouble. ./configure ./make usually ends up in some obsercure error or depedency... C++ usually makes the errors even more unreadable... C++ is the main thing I'm comparing C to. Yes, sorting out dependencies isn't fun.
  - xyzzyz 14y ago
    Array is good enough data structure for most uses, and Yeah, but in C you end up creating your own data structures from scratch every time. is not true.

guard-of-terra 14y ago

"ORMs are newer and hipper than those old boring outdated relational databases?" I stopped reading after this point since author obviously doesn't understand what he's talking about.

fauigerzigerk 14y ago
What does he not understand?
- esteth 14y ago
  an ORM is a library to map objects onto a relational database. They're not a substitute for databases themselves, but a substitute for a DB interaction library. ie: To use an ORM you must use a relational database. Things like mongoose exist, but they're not ORMs since they don't map objects to a relational database.
  - fauigerzigerk 14y ago
    I see what you mean. I thought he was mocking the idea of wrapping the old uncool relational model in a fashionable new OO API. What is substituted is not the relational DBMS but the relational model. ORMs are supposed to let you think in terms of objects instead of sets of tuples.
    - UK-AL 14y ago
      No, turns out most sql work involves extracting data from the resulting sql statement into objects. So you don't end up passing 5 params from the sql result everywhere. ORMs do these automatically, and go beyond.
      - fauigerzigerk 14y ago
        That's true for some basic CRUD operations and that's what ORMs should be used for. But people tend to just blindly copy everything into an object model and perform operations on those objects that could just as well have been done in a set oriented way with a lot less code causing a lot less network traffic. Obviously there are scalability downsides and not everything is easier to express in terms of sets, so I try to be pragmatic. You can of course do set operations through an ORM but that's not its purpose and the performance implications are sometimes tricky.

swalsh 14y ago

Most of object oriented programming to me feels like nothing more than trying to decide the best place to put something. As time goes on though, typically the 3rd iteration, there just is no good place to put this new thing. A redesign would be best, but I only have 1 week to finish this new feature. So a project (well at least in my experience) progresses like this: "Wonderful architecture" > "glad I designed this project well, its' paying dividends!" > "hmmmm I never considered this paradigm before" > "new guy joins team" > "argh this code is crap" Object oriented programming can be really elegant... but I can see why people hate on it.

hackinthebochs 14y ago
I think you summed it up well. People hate object oriented code because it has an extra startup burden. It's hard to just dive in and start fiddling with code because there are many project-specific abstractions you need to understand before-hand. The new guy on the project has to spend extra time to "grok" the idioms of the project. I personally don't see this as a bad thing. The fact is, abstraction is key to programming. People who have a hard time managing extra abstractions in their head probably aren't nearly as good of a programmer as they think.
- tetha 14y ago
  On the other hand, people complaining about this don't realize it is very much the same in any other language. Go ahead and just fiddle around in that million loc c codebase. Or that million loc java codebase. (and ignore for a second that that c codebase is a large compiler and that java codebase is an elaborate hello world). Or a hypothetical million line haskell codebase. In C you have to understand modules, functions working on structures and functions controlling the architecture. In Java you have to understand class hierachies and classes or functions managing the control flow. In haskell, you have to understand abstract data types, type classes and monads and functions managing control flow.

richieb 14y ago

Java is a new language? It's been around for 15 years or so. OO is even older - goes back to Simula 67 and Smalltalk in late 70s....

seanmcdirmid 14y ago

OO gets a bad rap, it is incredibly useful in applying ontology to program structuring. Yes, OOP in Java isn't ideal, but if you look at more pure OOP languages like Smalltalk or Self, its virtues really do begin to shine through. FP is great when expressing computations, but we often are just gluing nominal entities together, where OOP excels over FP. I like to have a few FP options in my languages (C#, LINQ), but my mind is firmly rooted in objects when it comes to overall macro design of the program.

ajuc 14y ago
OO is great for systems, where you have real objects, and only care about their current state. In effect - for simulations, games, such stuff. In most systems - changes over time, archival data, and relations between objects are important. And with OO it's ugly to keep them. You end up implementing relational db backed by object collections. And your nice objects instead of representing nouns (Employee, etc.), start representing relations (Employement, etc.). So people use relational db with ORMs and load everything from database into objects only to show window/edit data, call one or 2 methods on these objects, and save data back into database. All this ceremony to write employee.giveRaise(raise) instead of giveRaise(employee, raise).
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  And yet this problem kind of goes away in a key value or graph database. I wonder if the ORM mismatch is often not one of objects getting in the way, but one of using relational in the first place. At anyrate, how you manage your objects (for things like search) is ideally orthogonal to the objects themselves; though this is difficult to accomplish in practice. I use objects in reactive (non-persistent/DB) systems all the time. Objects aren't the problem, but you do have to manage your dependencies dynamically by tracing/dirtying/and cleaning. Objects actually excel at encapsulating and managing state, it is much harder to do this with functions (see all the work on functional-reactive programming).
  - ajuc 14y ago
    Hm, I've never used key-value/graph datastore, and it seems I need to. Is there something like selects with joins for graph nodes? How do you represent changes in objects over time?

stitchy 14y ago

I'm interested in what alternatives that the author has for the Object Oriented "zealots." I'm assuming that his alternative is a functional language. Personally, I think that functional languages are great, but I don't think that's any reason to flame Java/C++/C#. These are great tools. They were created for specific reasons, and they can certainly be used in efficient ways. Of course, they can also be horribly abused. I don't think that it's fair to say that any particular language is the end-all be-all for development. You have to pick the right tool for the job.

rbanffy 14y ago

So, when Alan Kay implies Java damages the brain, he is quoted. When I say it, I get downvoted. Do I see a double standard here? BTW, I learned to program on a Texas (TI-55) calculator. What symptoms should I be presenting? ;-)

minikomi 14y ago
RSI, perhaps?
- rbanffy 14y ago
  Any age-related condition would be a fair guess ;-)

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

Objects are a poor man's closure. Closures are a poor man's object. Objects are a poor man's first-class module, and so are closures. First-class modules are a poor man's type-class. Type-classes are a poor man's first-class module. Hail, Torat Exists, the holy teachings of the existential type!