Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

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> I was under the impression that even today, most code is written in an object-oriented style (or at least, written in languages that support OOP).

Whoa there - those are very different claims! Most modern languages are multi-paradigm. You can write Python in an OO way, or a data oriented way, or a functional way, or whatever you like. The same is true of JavaScript/typescript. And modern Java. And lots of languages.

Just because the language has the class keyword doesn’t mean everything can be subtyped. If you have an entity-component system, you can’t necessarily inherit from your Entity type. Likewise I can’t inherit from a react component, just because JavaScript has classes. (At least not using modern react)

> Most modern languages are multi-paradigm. [..] And modern Java.

Modern Java is still very definitely OOP and not multi-paradigm. Other JVM languages, like Scala or Kotlin, add more multi-paradigm features to that ecosystem, but modern Java doesn't.

It tries to be OOP, but you can still implement a program with int, int[] and static methods.

And you can’t subtype those.

Other JVM languages, like scala, are more OO than Java.

Java has made some big strides here to catch up with the functional and data-oriented features other languages are all adding.

I was pretty surprised and impressed to see a modern example lately. There’s Record data types, stronger type inference with `var`, pretty great structural pattern matching, switch expressions (that return a value), stream apis for map, filter, and reduce etc. All of these move it further away from strictly OOP.

And separate but still cool is a pretty neat virtual thread system too. Java has definitely had a bit of a glow up since I learned it in uni.

> Whoa there - those are very different claims!

I suspect that the stronger claim is true - but even the weaker claim would invalidate the article's statements that "existing programming languages have little or no subtyping" and that OOP was a "fad" and has been left in the past.

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