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Have you ever worked on a project with millions of lines of code which is supposed to work together as a single piece? That is where OO is required. OO works wh

by anuraj 14y ago

Have you ever worked on a project with millions of lines of code which is supposed to work together as a single piece? That is where OO is required. OO works when you design your system to be composed of blackbox components. Right level of abstraction is the key. Facades must expose blackbox functionality to other components. You are never to look into the innards of a component (the whitebox model do not work). These days the WEB CRUD apps do not require OO as each service rarely exceeds few hundred lines and they never work as a monolithic piece. But once you put your head into a Telecom Switch, a flight control system, an MRI scanner - OO is the way to go. I think these days exponents of so called 'Functional Programming' just oversee the importance of abstraction in OO and try to use it in CRUD apps where it is clearly not warranted and then hurl abuses. Get a Life!

chriszf 14y ago
I did some work programming a sequence for a Siemens magnet, and while I can't comment on the quality of the code driving the hardware, the OOP API they exposed for sequence creation was as bad as it gets. There was no sense of abstraction at all; it was very much like someone took an old C-style library then systematically hid all the functions in different classes for fun. Now, I could imagine that someone somewhere declared the magnets would be cutting-edge C++, and that's exactly what happened. The point is that OOP is not necessarily the obviously correct way to manage the complexity of an MRI sequence. Any other style could have easily been substituted and not done worse.
- anuraj 14y ago
  The point is - OO was developed for managing complexity of large projects which were using procedural model at the time. Large teams found it easy to work in the OO paradigm as each component could be abstracted down to a facade they need to call. Obviously if you don't do it right - it is not going to work. But Functional Programming exposes exactly the same pitfalls of procedural model (it is just another name) which OO tried to address.
  - chriszf 14y ago
    It seems to me that you're talking about modularization for managing complexity, which FP does just fine. OOP doesn't have a monopoly on that. It takes discipline, but you can write well-structured code in any paradigm. To say that functional is the same as procedural programming is a complete misunderstanding of both. To say OO tried to solve the pitfalls of the other two paradigms is a misunderstanding of OO on the entire spectrum, from Alan Kay's original vision to modern implementations. Even forgiving those confusions for a moment, if it takes discipline to prevent your OO code from degrading to procedural code, how is it any better from just enforcing discipline on procedural code? If OO is quantifiably better, the default state of the code should be obviously better than with other techniques.
spacemanaki 14y ago
Aren't some (many?) telecom switches run with Erlang? I haven't used it, but from what I understand it's more functional than OO, is it not?
- anuraj 14y ago
  No - only few Ericsson ones are written in Erlang. Most use C++ and few softswitches use Java.
- chriszf 14y ago
  Freeswitch and Asterisk are both written largely in C, although it's unclear if that's representative of industry practice.
Chris_Newton 14y ago
Have you ever worked on a project with millions of lines of code which is supposed to work together as a single piece? That is where OO is required. I think you are conflating OO with modular design. The latter does not imply the former.

by anuraj 14y ago

chriszf 14y ago

I did some work programming a sequence for a Siemens magnet, and while I can't comment on the quality of the code driving the hardware, the OOP API they exposed for sequence creation was as bad as it gets. There was no sense of abstraction at all; it was very much like someone took an old C-style library then systematically hid all the functions in different classes for fun. Now, I could imagine that someone somewhere declared the magnets would be cutting-edge C++, and that's exactly what happened. The point is that OOP is not necessarily the obviously correct way to manage the complexity of an MRI sequence. Any other style could have easily been substituted and not done worse.

anuraj 14y ago
The point is - OO was developed for managing complexity of large projects which were using procedural model at the time. Large teams found it easy to work in the OO paradigm as each component could be abstracted down to a facade they need to call. Obviously if you don't do it right - it is not going to work. But Functional Programming exposes exactly the same pitfalls of procedural model (it is just another name) which OO tried to address.
- chriszf 14y ago
  It seems to me that you're talking about modularization for managing complexity, which FP does just fine. OOP doesn't have a monopoly on that. It takes discipline, but you can write well-structured code in any paradigm. To say that functional is the same as procedural programming is a complete misunderstanding of both. To say OO tried to solve the pitfalls of the other two paradigms is a misunderstanding of OO on the entire spectrum, from Alan Kay's original vision to modern implementations. Even forgiving those confusions for a moment, if it takes discipline to prevent your OO code from degrading to procedural code, how is it any better from just enforcing discipline on procedural code? If OO is quantifiably better, the default state of the code should be obviously better than with other techniques.

spacemanaki 14y ago

Aren't some (many?) telecom switches run with Erlang? I haven't used it, but from what I understand it's more functional than OO, is it not?

anuraj 14y ago
No - only few Ericsson ones are written in Erlang. Most use C++ and few softswitches use Java.
chriszf 14y ago
Freeswitch and Asterisk are both written largely in C, although it's unclear if that's representative of industry practice.

Chris_Newton 14y ago

Have you ever worked on a project with millions of lines of code which is supposed to work together as a single piece? That is where OO is required. I think you are conflating OO with modular design. The latter does not imply the former.