Evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013)

If you're only being buzzword compliant with Object Oriented Programming, yes, you're going to have a meh experience. If you're only going so far as to be buzzword compliant with, say, buying a guitar, it's much the same. On the other hand, if you also spend some time with diligent practice and study, which the purchase of the guitar would have enabled, you may well have an extraordinary experience.

Object Oriented Programming got to the level of "McDojo" martial arts practice. A minority of people learned the essence. The majority got to hang out with people spouting the same ideology, went through the same motions, and felt good about socializing while circle jerking together. So on the whole, it's accurate to say that OOP was oversold, in much the same way that martial arts was oversold. There was some calisthenic benefit, but not much more than that.

So what makes Functional Programming any different? I'm not so sure if anything can't turn out to be just a structured way of writing spaghetti code. Most writing is meh, and deserves to be eventually forgotten. Most music is meh, and deserves to be eventually forgotten.

Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is shite.

Steve Yegge made this argument in a more dramatic fashion in 2006, with his now notorious "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns": http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...

Isn't Pivotal responsible for the Spring (Java) framework? In that case it would make sense to trash-talk OOP for them, since Spring is widely known to take magic Java annotations to an absurd level. While OOP for things such as oauth and data binding etc. would result in slightly more verbose upfront code using just libs and light annotations, the majority of time spent in Spring/Spring Boot apps is trying to understand Spring's opinionated framework and boilerplate on Java newbie boards. Sadly, Spring has overtaken alternatives for Java developers who know what they're doing and generally exercise more mental discipline in their work.

This is old (2013). However, i think it's really ironic to talk trash about OOP while thinking in Java and pointing Alan Kay in the same post. Alan Kay being the father of OOP always made clear Java wasn't the OOPL he had in mind.

Presenting opinions as facts is dogmatism and that is exactly what this article is.

Many programmers moved from imperative programming to structured programming to object oriented programming (a form of structured programming), and some of them perceived benefits while others didn't. This is some paradigms work better with different requirements.

Any paradigm can be used to implement unmaintainable spaghetti. Don't blame the paradigm.

All evidence points to this article being bullshit.

I'd like to see someone try to make a decent game (including frontend) with Erlang, Haskell or Scala.

Sometimes you need to separate state into different objects and let those objects manage their own internal state otherwise the code becomes overly complex. OOP was invented specifically to support this kind of isolation. Yes, sometimes OOP makes it more difficult to follow the flow of logic but once you understand the structure and core components of the system, it's much easier to make non-breaking changes and additions to the code.

This article is just regurgitating FP rhetoric and preaching FP as a silver bullet.

Examples where OOP has worked really well: iOS and macOS. The Objective-C and Cocoa combo must be a large part of the success of these platforms.

Where it has not worked so well: Web-backend programming. To me OOP has always felt out of place there.

Pretty low-quality article, mostly just a bunch of links to other opinions. I'm used to better commentary from pivotal.

I don't really understand why functional programmers bash on OOP so much. If you code up a bunch of immutable objects with methods that return changed versions, you're now a functional object-oriented programmer. It's a pretty nice paradigm! It beats the hell out of "everything is a list" and car/cdr is your hammer.

Yeah, a lot of Java programmers fail to grok immutability and irritate us with wordy half-measures like builder patterns. On the other hand, the stream api allows you to write code that looks reasonably close to the clojure-equivalent -- perhaps a bit more verbose, but at least it's typesafe. If you want more concise there's Varvr. This is more of a culture problem than a language problem.

What evidence? The article presents none.

That's why I love C++. If you avoid using OOP, it quickly becomes a good enough language to use.

I just wish it was just faster to compile sigh.

Backtracks on the title's claim in the opening sentence. Then states some basic well-known points that even advocates of OOP would agree with, even in 2013. Then neglects to suggest solutions except alluding to functional programming a couple times.

Rewrite my 35k LOC in a language that makes writing the thing I am writing easier, and you will have a convert.

Reprimand me for doing the thing I am doing without providing tools or guidance on how to change, you have a new enemy.

most people are like sheeps .

they tend to follow whatever is bright and shiny without truly understanding why they even need it.

(2013)

For any given paradigm, has useful software been written using that paradigm? If so, it is not "bullshit". And it's not exactly surprising that well-known academics and theoretical computer scientists smack talk Java - it's not appropriate for most number-heavy problems. For the other 99% of programmers, it does CRUD pretty well.