Object Oriented Programming is an expensive disaster which must end

[zorbo]

Having programmed a lot of OO in Python and PHP (yeah, yeah, I know, but its OO implementation is actually rather good), I always felt OO was a pretty good way of doing things...

Until I hit the Java scene. Boy, is it a big mess. There I found some of the worst unreadable, unmaintainable, ungrokable, complex and brittle code I've ever seen. And that's not an exception, rather it's the standard. I suddenly understood why Python's logging implementation is such a disaster. It was ported from Java. I'm sorry if this offends the java programmers, but it feels like idiomatic java is just abstractions piled on abstractions upon patterns, in the hope of somehow making things more understandable or robust. It doesn't.

I've always thought of OO as simply abstraction and encapsulation. Functions on steroids, if you will. If something doesn't fit the OO paradigm, I don't try to shoehorn it in (which patterns seem to especially made for). If you manage to avoid doing that, OO works rather well if you ask me.

[chriswarbo]

One of the major points of the article is the "no True OO Programmer" fallacy:

this is my experience whenever I argue against Object Oriented Programming (OOP): no matter what evidence I bring up for consideration, it is dismissed as irrelevant. If I complain that Java is verbose, I’m told that True OOP Programmers let the IDE take care of some of the boilerplate, or perhaps I am told that Scala is better. If I complain that Scala involves too much ceremony, I’m told that Ruby lacks ceremony. If I complain about the dangers of monkey-patching in Ruby, I’m told that True OOP Programmers know how to use the meta-programming to their advantage, and if I can’t do it then I am simply incompetent. I should use a language that is more pure, or a language that is more practical, I should use a language that has compile-time static data-type checking, or I should use a language that gives me the freedom of dynamic typing. If I complain about bugginess, I’m told that those specific bugs have been fixed in the new version, why haven’t I upgraded, or I’m told there is a common workaround, and I’m an idiot if I didn’t know about it. If I complain that the most popular framework is bloated, I’m told that no one uses that framework any more. No True OOP Programmer ever does whatever it is that I’m complaining about.

[peterashford]

It's amazing that Java powers all those banks and corporations given how unmaintainable, ungrokable, complex and brittle it is. The fools.

[cturner]

What are examples of a good approaches to generic logging? In the past I've found log4j and the python stdlib logging to be frustrating to work with. But when I had a shot at writing my own approaches, I found it to be one of those domains that's harder to deal with than it looks. Someone will have though - interested to know of a good approach.

[chris_wot]

My goodness this guy takes a long time to get to any point!

Right now I've gotten to the point where he writes "We should note the irony that they are using Linux to explain OOP concepts, even though Linux is written in C, which is not an OOP language."

And yet... it implements OO concepts throughout the kernel. He then quotes Torvalds' comment about C++, yet does not mention that OO concepts are used.

This guy references the most random things. Some guy on HN and a Kuro5hin article from 2002 (he ought to look up my article on Buddhism, which shows that anyone could write anything on K5)...

No offense, but this massive rant could do with a copyeditor. More brevity would help me understand what point he is trying to make.

[gone35]

A wall of text indeed: at 30,000 words (including quotes), it's about the same length of a 100-page novella. You and the other commenters were not exaggerating.

Interestingly enough, 30,000 words is also a common 'crisis point' among aspiring writers[1]. Maybe that's what forced the article short.

[1] http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2011/07/the-...

[alkonaut]

What OO brought to The table (and what many advocates of FP are forgetting) is context sensitivity, that is, functions/methods are brought in scope by the owning object rather. Typing dog.bark() is a thousand times more powerful in terms of tooling than bark(dog) or SomeDogPackage::bark(dog). I prefer the FP style of coding but I can't see average devs giving up on Java/C# style tools.

Sure OO brought a lot of little code smells too, and we often end up making bad code, but it's not like we have to. Polyglot programmers that use e.g. Java+Scala or C#+F# probably make their OO code much better than others. I have almost completely stopped using mutable objects, long inheritance chains and nulls in C#, as an influence from F#.

For some scenarios having mutable objects is a near perfect fit (scene graphs for games or UI:s are good examples of code where both FP and non-object imperative usually looks worse).

[yogthos]

The good parts of OO aren't exclusive to it though. For example, Clojure provides protocols (http://clojure.org/protocols) and multimethods (http://clojure.org/multimethods) which result in far more flexible polymorphism than a language like Java.

[nbevans]

This is a truly fantastic post. It isn't a rant. It's a story of enlightenment that I encourage all HN'ers to read and absorb.

Disregard or play down the contents of this fantastic post at your peril. Understanding it and groking it could save you 5 years, 10 years or even a lifetime of writing software in the wrong way.

[davelnewton]

I have to assume you're being funny.

Otherwise I'd like a batch of whatever it is you're smoking.

[aikah]

> Functional languages such as Haskell, Erlang and Clojure offer powerful approaches to the problems that software developers have always faced.

So do JAVA,Ruby,C#,...

Why do FP folks always try to sell the fact the "OOP=bad / FP=good"?. I'm found of OOP, i'd never say "FP=bad",that would be ridiculous,FP concepts are interesting,i'd even say FP is fun.

Both are tools in my box.

Now if the problem is JAVA,good,we can talk about JAVA shortcomings.But JAVA is only one implementation of OOP concepts.

[yoodenvranx]

What I would love to see monthly or quarteryearly "competition" between functional and object oriented programmers. For each competition a jury selects a problem and then everybody can try to solve this problem as nice and clean as possible for his preferred programming language / paradigm. The best solutions are then judged / commented on by experts and put on a website. By this you would have perfect examples how each language / paradigm deals with a certain problem.

This is something I miss from the discussion: for each computational problem there is one tool which is "best" to solve it. Sometimes it is some esoteric Haskell magic and sometimes it is some lowlevel C++ bit manipulation.

[physical_salmon]

More of this. This endless debate about what is better - functional or OO is leading nowhere. The OO side is winning, since the majority of the industry is using it. The way to tear down the OO "hype", is by replacing things used in the industry with better alternatives written in a functional language.

Git (C) has eaten up both Darcs (Haskell) and Mercurial (Python), even though Python and Haskell are "clearly" superior languages, according to some.

[BozeWolf]

Functional has not much to do with object oriented. Scala for example is both functional and OO. I think you mean the competition between imperative and functional languages.

[TheLoneWolfling]

Look at The Computer Language Benchmarks Game.

It would be interesting to do a contest where each month a jury selects one of those problems and everyone focuses on that problem. The "boilerplate" is already there.

[igouy]

The web development platform comparison

https://www.plat-forms.org/

[d--b]

Oh come on! Now some kids are going to drop out of college to make this idea a startup...

[Fice]

One more quote by Alan Kay:

«OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.» (E-mail to Stefan Ram, 2003, http://www.purl.org/stefan_ram/pub/doc_kay_oop_en)

[kelvin0]

This is like reading John Galt's long winded speach in Ayn Rand`s Atlas Shrugged (and I shuddered ...) There are things I will never be able to 'un-read' ;)

[bigpeopleareold]

I read this all the way through because I love reading articles that bash OOP. I haven't read an OOP-bashin' article in awhile, so it is great to read a good ol' bashin' that is current. There were a number of times I giggled, like with the "fat models" debate in Rails, or the number of times where he said people wasted their best moments of their career worrying about clean OOP code.

I have bookmarked this good ol' OOP bashin' and I am considering it a must-read going forward, because I love me some OOP bashin'.

[mojuba]

Mediocre and bad code tends to multiply entities. On a small scale it's usually redundant global and local variables, or just plain stupid code like this:

    if (NULL == lpDataPointer)
    {
        /* Return FALSE */
        return FALSE;
    }
    else
    {
        /* Return TRUE */
        return TRUE;
    }

Now give the same programmer an OOP language and see what happens. Even a bigger disaster masqueraded as an OOP system.

I know I kind of repeat the author's True Scotsman's metaphor, but my point is, you can't kill a return operator or, say, code comments just because the majority of code around us tends to misuse it. Unfortunately for the OOP paradigm it makes multiplying even bigger entities easier, and at the same time its learning curve invites lo-fi coding.

Who's to blame?

[MrDosu]

Whats wrong about the above code? Does it not do what it means to do? Is your personal feeling for how this construct should be written syntactically any measure of intelligence?

[greymarch]

Good heavens. What a mess. This guy rambles on forever, and steps on his own points over and over again. I am desperate to leave comments on the actual site, and apparently 2 comments have been left, but I dont see the comments on the actual site nor is there a way to post a comment on the actual site. I am guessing whomever runs this site shut-down the comments section because this joker made an ass of himself with his endless rambling.

[mojuba]

No True Essay Writer steals reader's time. (This guy used some EssayFactoryFactory I suppose?)

[robmccoll]

Procedural programming for the win. One can write in an object-oriented style or functional style in C, but the language has enough of a barrier to entry to writing code of these varieties that most people write KISS procedural code unless the particular situation really benefits from doing otherwise.

[kevinkyyro]

My main problem with the proposition that "OOP is awful" is that the argument is basically "it's not the best so it's the worst".

The expression problem is not solved by every language, but basically because Lisps and Haskell solve it in their own ways, it is concluded that OOP is worthless.

There are a number of practical reasons OOP could be liked, other than the marketing of it to the Enterprise. It's a natural way to model real things. The syntax lends itself to things like auto-complete (foo.ba<tab>). And being liked is enough to make it not-awful if the people who like it are skilled enough -- it's sufficient even to say it can be better than other paradigms for some people.

Don't mistake that for me saying that OOP is the best at anything, but it's not the worst at everything.

[lucozade]

A little bit of data hiding wouldn't have gone amiss.

[thomasfl]

Spot on!

[davelnewton]

Too... many... quotes...

An unreasoned rant that's more parody than substance. Seems more a derivative pile-on than anything new or valuable.

[musername]

> this is my experience whenever I argue against Object Oriented Programming (OOP): no matter what evidence I bring up for consideration, it is dismissed as irrelevant.

This, I thought before even reading the article. I know that frustration myself too well, but have to admit I am often in the wrong, asking the wrong questions, having false preconception.

Lloking at different impleme tations it's clear, experts aren't all that sure, either, even though most implementation specifics aren't detrimental to OOP, so language critizism in lieu of OOP concepts is clearly a strawman. then I stopped reading.

[axilmar]

I've written my rebuttal here:

http://axilmar.blogspot.gr/2014/10/object-oriented-programmi....

[nbevans]

You don't come across well in this at all. 200 classes in a OO project is pretty small really. And you've never used DI ever? Really?

[chris_wot]

That's awesome :-) but... how did you manage to get through that massive rant and extract the author's main points?

[FallDead]

I think articles like these are akin clickbait. Mature developers understand that every paradigm has it's place. I mainly use functional for data processing and pipelining, and OOP for object modeling.

[reacweb]

Object Oriented Programming is not for all developers the same way that some excellent developers have problems with functional programming. I think OO is very well suite for bottom up way of thinking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-down_and_bottom-up_design).