Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

> OOP-bashing seems fashionable nowadays.

Yes, and for just cause. OOP was invented in Simula76 (1976) and popularized in C++ (1982). OOP solved a very real problem of allowing applications to logically scale in memory constrained systems by allowing logic to grow independently and yet retain access to memory already claimed by a parent structure. Amazing.

Now fast forward and you get languages like Java, Go, and JavaScript. These languages are garbage collected. Developers have absolutely no control over memory management in those languages. None at all. It really doesn't matter because the underlying runtime engines that power these languages are going to do whatever is in the best interest of execution speed completely irrespective of application or memory size. We just don't live in a world where the benefits offered by OOP exist. Technology has moved on.

The only reason for OOP today is code culture. Its a form of organizational vanity that continues to be taught because its what people from prior generations were taught. Most new languages from the last 15 years have moved away from OOP because it contains a lot of overhead as decoration with no further utility.

OOP certainly has some early roots in trying to be more efficient with code reuse, organization, and clarity of intent. Later on Java tried to alleviate serious productivity and security issues with garbage collection and cross platform portability. It certainly increased the distance between the hardware and the developer because there are more levels of indirection that can now degrade performance.

However with hardware progress, performance is not the only critical criteria when systems grow in size, in variety of hardware, with internet volumes, in the number of moving parts, and of people working on them. Equally if not more important are: maintainability, expressivity so less lines of code are written, and overall the ability to focus on essential complexity rather than the accidental one introduced by the langage, framework, and platform. In the world of enterprise software Java was welcomed with so much cheers that indeed a "code culture" started that grew to an unprecedented scale, internet scale really, on which OO rode as well.

However not all control is lost as you say. The JVM that also runs more advanced langages with a JIT that alleviates some of the loss of performance due to the levels of indirections. GC are increasingly effective and tunable. Also off-heap data structures such as ring buffers exist to achieve performance comparable to C when needed. See Martin Thompson video talks on mechanical sympathy, which he gave after working on high frequency trading on the JVM, and check his later work on Aeron (https://aeron.io/). As usual it's all about trade-offs.

I don't follow. Java is mega object oriented. Can you even write a standalone function? I get the impression you are focusing on a single aspect of OOP that has gone out of fashion without realizing by and large every application developer is doing OO development 99% of the time.

Nonsense. JavaScript developers will also tell you everything is framework. What these things really mean is that the person making the statement has only 1 perspective and so everything they see matches the only single lens through which they view the world.

All definitions of OOP in common use include some form of inheritance. That said I do OOP 0% of the time in my programming. Most developers I have worked with never do OOP unless the given language or employer forces it.

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