Reducing coupling and cutting down on code volume is also supposed to be one of the big wins for object-oriented programming. Incidentally, the languages which

Reducing coupling and cutting down on code volume is also supposed to be one of the big wins for object-oriented programming. Incidentally, the languages which I've found to do the best in this department are both object-oriented and functional. This is because one facilitates reusing datatypes while encouraging coupling to operations, while the other facilitates operation reuse while encouraging coupling to datatypes[1]. Since it's desirable to minimize coupling in both respects, being able to choose the better tool for the job in a context-dependent manner rather convenient. Incidentally, I find myself wondering why so many functional programming advocates nowadays seem to be caught up on the myths that object-oriented programming and functional programming are incompatible, or that object-oriented code is inherently messy and difficult to maintain. It makes me wonder if there are a whole lot of people out there whose only experience with object-oriented programming is the way things tend to get done in C++ or something like that. [1] This tension is described fairly well in Philip Wadler's essay The Expression Problem: http://www.daimi.au.dk/~madst/tool/papers/expression.txt http://www.daimi.au.dk/~madst/tool/papers/expression.txt