Comment by jcelerier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcelerier | Hacker News Reader

> There’s no objective and open evidence that OOP is better than plain procedural programming.

Really depends on what is your definition of "OOP" here

> Both Smalltalk and Erlang make use of OOP the way it was originally intended by its inventor, Alan Kay.

ah, the bad definition of OOP then.

Hint : most C apis that look like

    foo* foo_create(void);
    int foo_get_bananas(foo*);
    void foo_print(foo*, int, int);
    void foo_free(foo**);

are OOP, not procedural. They just lack the syntax sugar.

> Linus Torvalds is widely known for his open criticism of C++ and OOP.

yet he went on doing C++ for user-space code : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0

> Some might disagree with me, but the truth is that modern OOP has never been properly designed. It never came out of a proper research institution

as someone who did a phd in a "proper research institution", that's a completely bullshit criterion.

> OOP doesn’t have decades of rigorous scientific research to back it up

oh come on

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=object-oriented

> Really depends on what is your definition of "OOP" here

I smell a no-true-scotsman incoming..

>> Both Smalltalk and Erlang make use of OOP the way it was originally intended by its inventor, Alan Kay.

> ah, the bad definition of OOP then.

Message-based OOP is usually considered to be superior to inheritance by even OOP advocates, and even composition-based OOP by many. I don't see your evidence for "bad definition of OOP".

>Hint : most C apis that look like

> foo* foo_create(void);

> int foo_get_bananas(foo);

> void foo_print(foo, int, int);

> void foo_free(foo);

>

> are OOP, not procedural. They just lack the syntax sugar.

Not every API that uses a struct is OOP. If your foos use inheritance, virtual dispatch etc, then yes it's OOP. But usually it's just something like a struct to store state instead of having globals or multiple parameters even.

>> Linus Torvalds is widely known for his open criticism of C++ and OOP.

> yet he went on doing C++ for user-space code : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0

He's a pragmatist first and foremost, and the GUI libraries he uses (Qt) and the programmers that work on GUI code use C++, he said. I doubt he would write his own GUI framework in C++.

>are OOP, not procedural. They just lack the syntax sugar.

ADT's/"Object-based" programming (which is what you show above) is not the issue. The biggest problems occur when you introduce non-trivial inheritance/polymorphism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com