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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

This is typical. You, as well as Paul Graham, have gotten stuck in a certain programming model, based on your experience. You have both lost the flexibility of youth.

So, don't try to use pseudo arguments to say that object orientation is bad. It's not bad, it's very good. Defend your style, but don't do it by attacking our style. It's not politics here.

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OO programming may be older than you think. I was in my early twenties when I first encountered it. At first (for about a year) I even believed in it. So whether I'm right or wrong to dislike it, it's not simply because I'm old.

Axel Schreiner's book _Object Orientated Programming with ANSI C_ was published in 1994 and OO easily predates that by a good few years in the mainstream.

Schreiner is the German translation of Kernighan's books and this one is a nice example of using a preprocessor for C, written in awk, to gradually add OO to C so you can understand all the nuts and bolts under the hood of a "native" OO language. English translation PDF available for download. http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/index.html http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/ooc.pdf

More than a few years. This was the book that got everyone interested in OOP:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201113716

As the name suggests, the language it describes was developed in 1980.

I said "in the mainstream", not academia. I'm talking about when personnel departments heard of it and when marketing departments started labelling everything OO.

Symbolics was advertising their FLAVORS object oriented system in the mid-80s. And Symbolics was, literally, the first dot-com.

http://smbx.org/index.php/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18&Itemid=76

You're bringing up a pioneer in the commercial world of OO, I'm talking about suits using the term OO without knowing what the letters stood for.

OO is only an explicit design decision which can also be hidden in an implicit way of separating things which should be kept separated/dependent etc.

If you choose OO, you are automatically bound to the OO limitations (no matter how sophisticated this might be) of the designers of a certain kind of OO.

Already the fact that there exist so many different OO ways, shows clearly that OO is no really uniform, plain and straightforward concept. It is always designed with a certain kind of problems in mind, while in practice every problem has its own needs...

If flexibility is more important to you than some programming paradigm or scheme to follow, you certainly don't choose OO (if possible, depending on the language).

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