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Comment by zero_shift | Hacker News Reader

> "You wanted a banana, but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana, and the entire jungle."

When you say that, what exactly do you mean by it?

Joe Armstrong said that in the context of code re-usability in OOP. At first it took me a while to understand what he actually meant with that, because OOP is about making code re-usable, after all. But then I read an article that explained this quote in great length and other potential pitfalls of OOP, and then it all started to make sense.

I would write all of this in my own words, but it would become really long and I don't have the time at the moment. I tried to find the original article I read, but I'm unable to, but here is a similar article I just found: https://medium.com/@cscalfani/goodbye-object-oriented-progra...

I'd understand if the inflammatory writing style and the memes are not yours, but I skimmed through it and I think it does explain some of the problems well. I'm sure there are better written articles on this subject, but I have to leave now unfortunately.

Are you referring to this article? http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/OO_programming/why_oo_suck...

I definitely also read that one back then (I keep stumbling upon this website every now and then, it contains some really interesting articles), but I remember that it was too vague for me to understand his point about why OOP sucks. I searched further until I found the article I mentioned, it was much longer and more detailed than this one, and not by Joe himself.

Looking at that article, it seems nearly every complaint is about inheritance. But it is quite possible to use objects with composition. In fact, I think 'composition over inheritance' has been a commmonplace since the late 1990s.

I understand it as: OO hides the distinction between a standalone value and a service connected to a bunch of hidden state.

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