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> This sort of begs the question: where does classical OOP, the one taught to all undergrad CS majors in programs that use Java or C++, really fit in nowadays?

I have no idea. The smalltalk ideal of OOP lives on in all sorts of ways, but the deep inheritance chain version that gets taught in classes? I don't think it has a place apart from maintaining existing code.

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I like to call that style "modeling a taxonomy of the world". Even real-world carefully studied taxonomies change all the time, good luck adapting your code base when an employee is also a customer. It was a crap style from the very beginning.

Smalltalk style OOP has its own issues, but there's lots of good aspects to it and you really have to experience Smalltalk as a complete system to really get it, it's nothing like Simula/C++/Java-style OOP.

That said, best thing you can learn in your programming career is to get rid of "Customer" classes (or whatever the equivalent is for your particular problem). A customer is a unique entity represented by an ID, a private key if you will, which links data in various systems.

Need to split some part of your codebase that handles authentication into a separate microservice for whatever reason? No problem, the same key can be used to refer to data in that system.

Your program magically becomes more modular, more maintainable, easier to understand, and more performant, all in one go.

Use OOP when you need an abstract interface to something that can be implemented in various different ways, e.g. data structures or plugin systems, stuff like that. Any time I see "PODs" full of getters and setters I cry on the inside (and sometimes on the outside).

Would you mind explaining this part a little more - I do not get the difference between a Customer class and a customer as a unique entity represented by an ID?

"That said, best thing you can learn in your programming career is to get rid of "Customer" classes (or whatever the equivalent is for your particular problem). A customer is a unique entity represented by an ID, a private key if you will, which links data in various systems."

Hi q-base, it all comes down to the single responsibility principle. What is the single responsibility of the Customer class?

What methods should it have? What does a Customer do exactly? Or is it just a POD which simply stores customer data? If so which data? Does it mix authentication information with the user's purchase history? Maybe not that but what about the user's little Avatar in the UI?

The answer is none of the above, the single responsibility of the Customer class is to identify a user, that's it. In the end that's just a number, no need for a class. The purchase history of a user is only relevant to the system that manages the purchase history. The avatar is only relevant to the UI. The authentication information to the authentication service.

A Customer is not in and of itself an "entity" of some sort with associated behavior in the OO sense. But you see this all the time with companies trying to model these taxonomies of their business as class hierarchies.

It's an unhelpful practice that imposes a structure on your code that's not relevant in a any way to the actual functionality of your software.

What is a POD?

"Plain Old Data". An OO term for a simple record/struct with getters and setters and no associated behavior.

Thank you very much for for detailed response. Now I understand where you are going with it. It seems very powerful and would illicit endless expandability. Because I have not thought about modelling it on such abstract level before I am left with some questions as to how complex a model this leaves. I do not know if I am too locked in OOP-land but I like that with this thinking, you can have a SSN table for instance that references this ID and limit access to it on that level instead of having to scramble parts of tables for instance. I can also see it being useful for endless additions of tables that can relate to that ID.

But I cannot fully comprehend in which scenarios this would be a clear winner and which it would add too much overhead. There is something to it though, so thanks for opening my eyes.

GUIs actually map quite well to that OOP model. Different sort of widgets where only the behavior is changed In children.

So does any hardware.

The deepest inheritance chains I saw in practice were the OOP GUI programming toolkits, they'd go six-seven deep and invariable started needing to clone logic to avoid diamond issues (they were always single inheritance it seemed).

Honestly OOP did a lot better in those than the procedural toolkits they replaced in many ways. It was generally "better".

So if we're going to dump OOP for ??? I would say that a really amazing GUI toolkit that is pretty clearly better than the classical OOP inheritance model would really underscore the point. I can see a compositional interface GUI toolkit that is great.

I have since those days not done a native UI, so all of the modern ones, from KDE/Qt, GNOME, whatever the hell replaced MFC on windows, etc I am clueless about.

Plus all UIs are kind of dominated by HTML/CSS/javascript style of code, which is its own special evolutionary tree at this point.

> The smalltalk ideal of OOP lives on in all sorts of ways, but the deep inheritance chain version that gets taught in classes?

What is the deepest chain we find in SmallTalk itself? I can't check it right now, but I'm sure it's not as deep as some classroom examples I've seen. Inheritance makes a lot of sense when you are modelling the world, but most structures we see in the real world aren't that deep.

Just looked in the current Squeak trunk image as an example. The max depth of a Class from Object (rather than from the metaclasses like Behavior, ProtoObject, etc -- these to me are irrelevant to the count) is 8. There are very few 8, 7, or even 6 deep classes. The vast majority are between the 1-3 range.

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