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Comment by peterashford | Hacker News Reader

I'm really sick of these 'why blah sucks' posts. Clearly OOP works for a lot of people. If it doesn't work for you, don't use it. My personal feeling is that FP works better when the problem domain is more data oriented, requiring transformation of data streams whereas OOP is good when the problem domain is about simulating or modeling where you want to think about interacting agents of some kind. The whole 'X is one true way' argument is narrow sighted. I feel the problem should always precede the solution

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When I was a tutor (TA) at university (collage) here in aus, I marked assignments from my students. We used an automated test suite to check correctness. I went over each assignment to subjectively assess code style. I would open the first assignment which scored full marks with the test suite and find it was a clean 500 line long implementation. Full marks. The next submission also got full marks, but it did it by spending only 200 lines. How? Was it overly terse? No... it looked clean and decent too. I would go back and look at the first submission and wonder - if you asked “could you throw away 60% of this codebase without sacrificing readability?” I would have answered of course not. But I would have been wrong. Silently, uncorrectably wrong if not for my unique opportunity.

In the programming work you do regularly, do you think there is a way you could structure your code which would allow you to do 60% less work, without sacrificing readability? If there is, would you know? The answer was clearly yes in the web world when jquery was king. Or cgi-bin on Apache. Is it still true today? Can we do better still?

If there is, it would probably demand a critical look at the way we approach our problems, and how we structure logic and data. The value in articles like this is to point at that question. For what it’s worth, I agree with Joe Armstrong and others who have been heavily critical of OO. Software which goes all-in on OO’s ideas of inheritance and encapsulation seems to consistently spend 2-3x as many lines of code to get anything done, compared with other approaches. (Looking at you, enterprise java.)

You’re right - the problem should proceed the solution. But our tools are the medium through which we think of that solution. They matter deeply.

I think this is mostly a reflection of the thing Java/C#/C++ have popularized as “OOP”: if one uses Common Lisp’s CLOS, much of the boilerplate associated with “design patterns” and OO architecture evaporates.

Yes absolutely. The article was written around 2000 when Java was the new sexy thing. When Joe talks about OOP being overhyped, he wasn’t talking about Rust’s traits or Common Lisp. He’s speaking about the hype around Java and C++, and the then-lauded three pillars of OO: Encapsulation, Inheritance and Polymorphism.

Not all OO works that way. In retrospect, inheritance was probably a mistake. And as far as I can tell, modern “OO-lite” coding styles focussing on composition over inheritance work pretty well. Alan Kay: “When I invented object oriented programming, C++ was not what I had in mind.”

My inclination is to say that inheritance isn't the mistake, the mistake is making methods part of a class: my experience with inheritance in CL is that having generic functions/methods as their own first-class construct makes inheritance less of a minefield.

I learned OOP in 1992, using Turbo Pascal 5.5, and got hold of Turbo Pascal 6.0 with Turbo Vision, shortly thereafter.

My follow up OOP languages until 2000 were C++ alongside OWL, VCL, MFC. Clipper 5.x, Eiffel, Sather, Modula-3, Oberon variants, Smalltalk, CLOS, SWI Prolog, Delphi and naturally Java.

In 1999 I got a signed copy from the ECOOP 1999 proceedings, full of alternative OOP approaches.

We should strive to actually provide proper bases to CS students, instead of market fads.

Actually, I said: "I invented the term "object-oriented", and I didn't have C++ in mind".

In other comments here I explain why "object-oriented" was a too quick and bad choice for what I thought I was doing ...

Thanks, this is a great comment.

The post was "why OO sucks," not "why nobody should ever use OO." The distinction is important because everything sucks a little bit—especially in computer programming.

Understanding the objections to various programming paradigms can help improve how you use them, by having an awareness of what others consider potential minefields. (And who knows, maybe the arguments will change your mind. You shouldn't be so quick to prejudge the material.)

> I'm really sick of these 'why blah sucks' posts. Clearly OOP works for a lot of people. If it doesn't work for you, don't use it.

Most of us work in teams. If people I work with believe something that's not true, then it directly effects my work. If the majority of the profession believes something, it significantly effects my entire career. I don't actually hate OOP, although I have criticisms, but the attitude of "if you don't like it go somewhere else" is missing the point. Criticism isn't meant to be mean or nasty, it's meant to point out bad thinking for the benefit of us all. What bothers ME is the positivity police on hacker news that thinks that "if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all" applies to all of life.

> If it doesn't work for you, don't use it.

How many of us actually get a choice in this...?

Also, for how many does it really work?

I mean, most devs don't really know anything else, just accept it and try to get by...

I wonder if it would be constructive to modify the OP's statement a little bit. You can get there from here using any approach (as long as it is Turing complete ;-) ). Some approaches will work better than others, but optimising your approach first and convincing others second is putting the cart before the horse. Having a happy team that works well together is going to provide at least an order of magnitude more ROI than choosing the best approach. Compromising on your approach to make others happy will almost certainly pay off hugely. Get good at as many types of approaches as you can so that you can take advantage of those payoffs. The cult of "I must use the absolute best approach for this problem, everyone else be damned" is one that leads to misery IMHO (especially if it turns out that your "best approach" isn't, which happens most of the time in my experience ;-) ).

These days many languages are so expressive you can establish a dominant paradigm in the part of the code you work on. We have a kind of micro-level choice that even the most authoritarian code-reviews can't largely stamp out (provided that the interface you provide is in harmony with the rest of your organization.)

Actually, this is not really about if OO sucks, but to reflect on one of the articles Joe Armstrong wrote. Joe passed away two days ago.

Please refrain from such self-centered, flippant dismissals. They tend to get in the way of potentially good discussions.

>>Clearly OOP works for a lot of people.

Something can work for a lot of people, and still suck.

>> If it doesn't work for you, don't use it.

Language and tool choices in our industry are made by a tiny minority. In fact, sometimes the people making those decisions are not even developers themselves! From that perspective alone, articles like this one are valuable.

Aside from that though, the question isn't whether OOP "works" or not. Rather, it is when it works, and for how long, until you run into a myriad of problems, such as leaky abstractions or inheritance hell. These are worth discussing. If you disagree, you can move on. No need to voice your misgivings.

Please refrain from telling others to refrain. The negatives are worth discussing, but not the positives? I want to hear everyone's thoughts not only yours.

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