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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

You're not wrong.

It's fashionable to dunk on OOP (because most examples - like employee being a subtype of person - are stupid) and ORM (because yes you need to hand write queries of any real complexity).

But there's a reason large projects rely on them. When used properly they are powerful, useful, time-saving and complexity-reducing abstractions.

Code hipsters always push new techniques and disparage the old ones, then eventually realise that there were good reasons for the status quo.

Case in point the arrival of NoSQL and wild uptake of MongoDB and the like last decade. Today people have re-learned the value of the R part of RDBMS.

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Large projects benefited from OOP because large projects need abstraction and modularization. But OOP is not unique in providing those benefits, and it includes some constructs (e.g. inheritance, strictly-dynamic polymorphism) that have proven harmful over time.

Inheritance == harmful is quite an extreme position.

It may be extreme, but it's very common. It's probably the single most common argument used against OOP. If you drop out inheritance, most of the complaints about OO fall away.

Can you share where you've seen inheritance get dropped and it resulted in fewer complaints about OOP?

Anecdotally, yes. In work efforts where inheritance was kept to a minimum (shallow, more sensible, class structures) there were far fewer issues with both complaints and problems caused by it.

Outside that, look to Go. Some people will waste a few pages and hours of their life arguing about whether it is or isn't OO, but it provides everything other OO languages provide except for inheritance (struct embedding kinda-sorta looks like inheritance, but it's composition and some syntax sugar to avoid `deeply.nested.references()`). It provides for polymorphism, encapsulation, and information hiding. The complaints about Go are never (or rarely) about its OO system.

OOP without inheritance is exactly what VB6 had… now its cool again, I guess.

Always has been.

That position's not uncommon, but generally people who hold it prefer the rust style trait/interfaces system. To me it makes more sense, I don't care what this object is so long as it guarantees to provide me with certain functionality that I need.

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