The faster you unlearn OOP, the better for you and your software

https://dpc.pw/the-faster-you-unlearn-oop-the-better-for-you-and-your-software

by jxub • 8 years ago

209 242 8 years ago

adnzzzzZ2• 8 years ago

The vast majority of essential code is not operating on just one object – it is actually implementing cross-cutting concerns. Example: when class Player hits() a class Monster, where exactly do we modify data? Monster's hp has to decrease by Player's attackPower, Player's xps increase by Monster's level if Monster got killed. Does it happen in Player.hits(Monster m) or Monster.isHitBy(Player p). What if there's a class Weapon involved? Do we pass it as an argument to isHitBy or does Player has a currentWeapon() getter?

As an indie dev this is something that I struggled with early on and my solution so far has been to choose the most obvious place where all those things should happen and just do it there (in this case it would be on the Player, in other less obvious cases it gets more fuzzy). What does the non-OOP solution for this problem look like?

jdub• 8 years ago

Entity-Component-System, amusingly explained in this great talk from RustConf.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKLntZcp27M

adnzzzzZ2• 8 years ago

That solution is more burdensome than OOP

jcelerier3• 8 years ago

but... all ECS systems use classes or equivalent at some point

krapht• 8 years ago

It looks like a bunch of flat, 2d tables like you might find in a spreadsheet or database.

geocar2• 8 years ago

What does the non-OOP solution for this problem look like?

    function hit(player, weapon, monster) {

This is a major problem with single dispatch, a popular OOP implementation choice, but not the only one. Common Lisp and C++ have multiple dispatch, which is a generally accepted solution to this problem.

It seems like a lot of the challenges you're facing has to do with object-oriented design not being a good fit for your problem. Some problems really do organise well into independent actors, maybe the one you're doing isn't one of them?

vnorilo2• 8 years ago

I don't think C++ has a dynamic multiple dispatch mechanism. You can craft one with the visitor pattern or some precompiling or macro sheanigans. I'd love to hear about the best way of doing it.

geowwy• 8 years ago

when class Player hits() a class Monster, where exactly do we modify data? Monster's hp has to decrease by Player's attackPower, Player's xps increase by Monster's level if Monster got killed. Does it happen in Player.hits(Monster m) or Monster.isHitBy(Player p). What if there's a class Weapon involved? Do we pass it as an argument to isHitBy or does Player has a currentWeapon() getter?

I don't see how this is a problem unless you think programming objects correspond with physical objects.

My first thought is make a separate Swing class representing the player swinging their weapon. There's probably an even better way to do it but this gets around the issues mentioned above.

    class Player {
      fun takeSwing {
        swing = new Swing(
          this.currentWeapon,
          this.location.offset(this.direction)
        )
        if swing.killedMonster {
          this.xp += swing.monster.level
        }
      }
    }

    class Swing {
      fun new(weapon, location) {
        this.weapon = weapon
        this.monster = findMonster(location)
        if this.monster != null { this.monster.takeHit(this) }
        this.killedMonster = this.monster != null && this.monster.dead
      }

      fun damage {
        return this.weapon.baseDamage
          + this.weapon.bonusDamage
      }
    }

    class Monster {
      fun takeHit(swing) {
        this.hp -= swing.damage - this.defence
        if this.hp <= 1 { this.die }
      }
    }

coldtea7• 8 years ago

I don't see how this is a problem unless you think programming objects correspond with physical objects.

This is a problem because we don't just want "any old design that sorta kinda works" but a guiding principle to our design, and to find the optimal place for each action/data.

segmondy4• 8 years ago

Good example, I think that's why people struggle with OOP, they do think that "programming objects correspond with physical objects". This is the same reason they struggle with storing states in databases because they try to map OOP to tables.

eitland• 8 years ago

I read this quickly to see if this was the piece that should convince me.

It was not. It is, IMO, a collection of strawmen.

People have abused OOP? Yes.

But

- citing FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition (which is really funny even for us Java/.Net developers because it is so horribly wrong)

or writing this

- Because OOP requires scattering everything across many, many tiny encapsulated objects, the number of references to these objects explodes as well. OOP requires passing long lists of arguments everywhere or holding references to related objects directly to shortcut it.

again IMO, demonstrate that the author never really understood OOP.

What probably is true however is that a lot of people should unlearn the OOP they learned in school.

bvrmn2• 8 years ago

What probably is true however is that a lot of people should unlearn the OOP they learned in school.

Can you provide references for proper OOP?

hoorayimhelping• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID

I wish they would have taught me this in school. Instead, I learned that a cat is an animal, and a car has wheels, and a car is a vehicle. But not what any of these things have to do with one another and how to actually use them.

itronitron4• 8 years ago

The Java Swing API is a good example of OOP done well.

alasdair_4• 8 years ago

Can you provide references for proper OOP?

Joshua Bloch's "Effective Java" is well worth a read. He outlines specific principles like "Favor composition over inheritance" (https://medium.com/@rufuszh90/effective-java-item-16-favour-...) in just a couple of pages each.

I also want to strongly recommend Martin Fowler's "Refactoring" since it covers a lot of "good" OOP design and gives practical advice on how to take bad code and make it better.

The original "gang of four" "Design Patterns" book is also pretty good, although definitely less practical than the other two.

timbit423• 8 years ago

Smalltalk does "OOP" properly because it focuses on message passing, the real benefit of "OOP". Any OOPL that isn't based on message passing is degenerate.

totemizer2• 8 years ago

maybe this will then? http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/object-oriented-progr...

kstenerud2• 8 years ago

Unfortunately, no. While he hasa lot of good arguments, they're drowned out by his repeated use of logical fallacies to push his point across. This long, rambling piece simply comes off as him bullying the reader into agreeing with him.

Note that I'm not saying he doesn't have valid points hidden in that wall of text, but he's certainly lacking the social skills and reader empathy to land a good argument, and as a result its too exhausting to take him seriously.

tree_of_item2• 8 years ago

Maybe you should go back and read it slowly, as it was a good argument.

again IMO, demonstrate that the author never really understood OOP.

This is what they always say...strange how OOP is the one paradigm no one ever seems to understand, no matter how much is written about it. Seems to me like there isn't actually anything to understand.

matthewmacleod4• 8 years ago

Maybe you should go back and read it slowly, as it was a good argument.

Don't be a dick.

It's not. Developers from various backgrounds frequently fail to understand all different kinds of development paradigms, and I've seen _just_ as much awful imperative code as I have awful OO code.

itronitron4• 8 years ago

Yes, people have abused OOP and every other programming paradigm or tool as well. It's probably a necessary aspect to learning something new... do something contrived, atrocious, and trivial in order to understand the concepts.

The OOP naysayers seem to often knock the textbook examples, but there are a lot of creative things that can be done with OOP that get around the criticisms.

coldtea7• 8 years ago

- Because OOP requires scattering everything across many, many tiny encapsulated objects, the number of references to these objects explodes as well. OOP requires passing long lists of arguments everywhere or holding references to related objects directly to shortcut it.

again IMO, demonstrate that the author never really understood OOP.

That's a "No true Scotchman/OOP" fallacy. The OOP that the author "never understood" is what we see ALL the time in enterprise and startup code.

There could be a better OOP (e.g. Alan Kay's definition of it), but that's not what people are taught or practice.

iainmerrick• 8 years ago

The OOP that the author "never understood" is what we see ALL the time in enterprise and startup code.

Well, is there a paradigm where you tend to see mostly good code? If so I’ve never come across it. Besides plenty of bad OO, I’ve seen bad functional programming, bad reactive programming, very bad state machines. Bad code is bad code.

(And what other categories of code are you thinking of, besides “enterprise and startup”? Those two would seem to cover a pretty wide range.)

alasdair_4• 8 years ago

- Because OOP requires scattering everything across many, many tiny encapsulated objects, the number of references to these objects explodes as well. OOP requires passing long lists of arguments everywhere or holding references to related objects directly to shortcut it.

This drove me nuts too - it's the exact opposite of what OO design suggests to do. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Demeter

ergothus• 8 years ago

again IMO, demonstrate that the author never really understood OOP.

I find arguments like this (legitimately fascinating). Obviously an amount of investment into learning common concepts is required. At the same time, if a topic is too complex for most to "truly understand" than it isnt useful.

How do we know the difference? What standards do we hold other coders to, and what expectations do we hold ourselves to?

I'd love to hear if there is much research on the topic. It is easy to find opinion articles, hard to fund data.

lispm• 8 years ago

Some things never die. comp.object on usenet (15+ years ago) had a regular 'guest' explaining why table-oriented programming is better than OOP:

http://www.oocities.org/tablizer/top.htm

dredmorbius• 8 years ago

Wow, that brings back memories....

antialias3• 8 years ago

In the context of creating a formal model for decision-making, yes table-oriented design can be a superior choice.

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/decision-tables/

hliyan4• 8 years ago

This has been shared on HN many years ago, but I'm linking again in case there are younger engineers who might be unaware of this classic rant: Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns : https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...

nyc111• 8 years ago

That was great. I read it for the first time. Similar scenarios happen in so many other fields. Some bad idea takes hold. Then schools teach it. Then more people invest time learning it so that they cannot admit it is bad and this goes spreading like wildfire and become sacred...

hliyan4• 8 years ago

And then someone discovers that the old way was better and gives it a new name. When I was in school, functional programming was called "programming".

_old_dude_2• 8 years ago

Java type system is nominal not structural.

While this rant rung a bell at that time, i've always found that this rant was too easy. Java had non public class, annonymous class and import static at that time.

Nowadays, the Javaland has steal lambda and var from Scala, moving away from a real kingdom of nouns (partially, you still need those pesky functional interfaces).

thanatropism• 8 years ago

I'm a simple man. I don't have an advanced education in computer science (I did have a SICP-inspired first course in programming as an undergrad and an algorithms course in grad school using Dasgupta and Kleinberg/Tardos).

Like everyone who's doing stuff with data, I live in Python now. I'm fairly conversant in functional idioms (wrote a monad tutorial when it was all the fashion), but like objects because they're a straightforward way to keep data and code together in a bundle that can be passed around and serialized.

The typical situation for me is machine learning - I could have "fit_to_data" functions that return matrices or otherwise sum/product types (as they called it in Haskell) containing the estimated parameters and "predict_from_param_struct" functions, but having the whole thing in a bundle erases the whole problem of having to remember a weight matrix comes from a logistic classifier and not a linear regressor. That, or use an idiom like

     data LogisticParams a = LogisticP (Matrix a)

(I don't remember Haskell syntax anymore) but I'm not sure how I'm better served by that. The scikit-learn-type idiom where every regressor is expected to have .predict and .fit methods helps me build new regressors while reutilizing all of the scikit-learn cross-validation/hyperparameter search tooling. The idiom above would require me to study the hierarchy of types upwards and whatever advanced features of the language they're using; but even if the scikit-learn team is using features of Python outside my understanding (say, async, or low-level numpy/communication with C libraries) I'm still able to adhere to a convention.

---

That said, have y'all ever heard of Formal Concept Analysis [1]? It seems to me that a lot of the malaise about OOP is that tutorials and examples and maybe even production code (what the hell do I know) are struggling to define ad hoc concept hierarchies -- is it Kitchen.Lights.off() or Lights.off("kitchen")? What scikit-learn (and the universe around it that tries to adhere to the dialect) is simply to embed data (parameters which are derived from data) in code that knows how to use it. No one's trying to decide how TopologicalSpace.MeasurableSpace fits with IntegrableFunctions.ProbabilityMeasures...

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275540145_Formal_Co...

agumonkey• 8 years ago

The problem with OOP is that it became so ubiquitous. Everything had to be OO, millions of hours spent trying to fit everything inside absurd taxonomies.

There's good bits in OO. You can find articles about how parameterizing large `switch` statements into objects can lead to obvious improvements.

My only conclusion is to bet on biodiversity~. I learned so much in relational (db) logic, functional programming, logic programming, stack languages (forth threaded code) etc etc. As soon as your brain sense something useless discard it and find another cool trick/theorem to grok.

partycoder• 8 years ago

Bashing imperative + structured + OOP is valid if you have a viable alternative. That viable alternative is proper namespacing, modularity and functional programming.

If your alternative is another form of spaghetti your problem is not OOP. Your problem is the way you build abstractions.

If your procedures and functions, the foundation of your program, are poorly thought, then you laid a shitty foundation for everything that follows.

dnautics3• 8 years ago

Should be pointed out that this refers to C++/Java/Ruby/python style objects, and not smalltalk/erlang style objects, which is a message passing model for data storage.

totemizer2• 8 years ago

And you do the first thing this author describes: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/object-oriented-progr...

dnautics3• 8 years ago

Not really. Almost no one would call erlang or elixir an Oop language, but one basically does everything using Kay's style.

No true Scotsman doesn't apply when the original definition legitimately shifts

mbell• 8 years ago

Ruby has smalltalk style objects.

snazz• 8 years ago

Could someone enlighten me as to how Java style OOP differs from Smalltalk's variant? I've read the Alan Kay quote on how he's sorry for focusing on objects instead of message passing but I'm still unsure on how Smalltalk is so much better not having used it.

dnautics3• 8 years ago

I can't speak for smalltalk but the actor model in erlang (but especially in elixir) is a joy.

timbit423• 8 years ago

This may not answer your question and may not be 100% correct.

Message passing means that objects have their own data and do not have shared access to it. This makes multi-threading and parallelized code very easy to do because you don't have to worry about data changing unexpectedly. Clojure, and other languages, achieve this by making data immutable, which has a similar effect.

As you mentioned, after Alan Kay used the term "object-oriented" to describe Smalltalk, people focused on the objects instead of the messages and created languages designed around the idea of being object-oriented instead of around message passing (I believe Objective-C and Ruby do message passing), thereby missing the benefit. All OOPLs not based on message passing should die.

Also, unlike Java, Smalltalk has no classes. Any existing object can be used as a template to create a new object.

sunseb• 8 years ago

Yeah I agree so much. OOP is good when you are in school and you a have perfect use case like Vehicule, Car, Bicycle, but when you work on something else, you end up with abstract, absurd and bloated objects. OOP is only profitable for IT consultants, because they can sell books and bill many hours working on this mess.

jryan498• 8 years ago

The vast majority of essential code is not operating on just one object – it is actually implementing cross-cutting concerns. Example: when class Player hits() a class Monster, where exactly do we modify data? Monster's hp has to decrease by Player's attackPower, Player's xps increase by Monster's level if Monster got killed. Does it happen in Player.hits(Monster m) or Monster.isHitBy(Player p). What if there's a class Weapon involved? Do we pass it as an argument to isHitBy or does Player has a currentWeapon() getter?

Not saying this is the right way to do things but, if you're actually going to go 100% OO on something:

Player.hits(Monster) returns Hit

Hit takes a Player and a Monster in constructor, and has with(Weapon)

You end up with:

Player.hits(Monster).with(Weapon)

Then Hit reaches into said objects and deals with changing the HP, and XP. You then have encapsulated the details in the actual Hit itself, which seems correct.

It does read kind of nicely IMO...

jstimpfle11• 8 years ago

It does read kind of nicely IMO...

And this one line is why you're willing to setup all these crap boilerplate supporter classes and take a huge hit in runtime performance?

jryan498• 8 years ago

A lot of languages are made for this kind of interaction and can inline stuff hopefully, but that's the job for the VM or compiler.

I didn't say it was the "right" way to do it. Also programming is the art of tradeoffs. If this does actually give bad performance, maybe it's a trade off the programmer is willing to make.

Just like the article started off with "I don't think there's a silver bullet". OOP is a tool just like any other with pluses, and minuses.

Also the Hit class may be a Singleton and only instantiated once.

jcelerier3• 8 years ago

And this one line is why you're willing to setup all these crap boilerplate supporter classes and take a huge hit in runtime performance?

at least in C++, why would they ? it'll all gets inlined and you can do it so that there isn't any memory allocations if you know all of your cases at compile time (of course most of the time you want to be able to add new weapons, behaviours, etc, at runtime but in game engines you generally use scripting languages for this anyways).

Novashi6• 8 years ago

And this one line is why you're willing to setup all these crap boilerplate supporter classes and take a huge hit in runtime performance?

Hits don't usually happen that often in games relative to everything else the engine is doing unless you're writing something like MMO server code that processes hits from thousands players.

Yours is a classic case of over-optimizing, I think.

matthewmacleod4• 8 years ago

I'm pretty confused by how you perceive this. I don't see "crap boilerplate supporter classes" – I see objects that encapsulate events and actors for all the usual OOP reasons.

I wonder if some of this disagreement is down to the way that different people abstract this problem in their heads.

crazygringo2• 8 years ago

Great point... but doesn't it continue to prove the author's point that this is needlessly complex?

It strikes me as bad design if something as simple as an action (hit) now needs to become it's own class that is instantiated merely to execute a single function and then have to delete itself. That just feels like insane overhead/boilerplate, no?

The argument here is that it's far better to have player and monster be simple data structures, and a single function hit(player, monster, weapon).

jryan498• 8 years ago

The Hit class may be a Singleton and only instantiated once. Creating a class is like 3 actual lines. Also at least in Java the Hit class can be an inner class of the Person class. It just feels like name spacing in that case.

It is needless complex if the code is simple.

This solution is more flexible that just a pure function. If you have different players who use different hit strategies how do you handle that with just a pure function? Lots of if statements in the function? Passing in lambdas in every case you call the function? Then you could curry the function and call it something different too and that works I guess. OOP shines when you have lots of different ways things can work in different combinations. OOP is a tool like other programming paradigms, you use it when it solves your problem better than the other ways.

Novashi6• 8 years ago

Hit is an event that occurs, so not sure why it should escape OO even though in this example even though it's only decreasing ints. I routinely code event objects rather than modifying another class directly by the delta that should occur. OO isn't good for continuous time and events but it does add ergonomic convenience for the developer in this case (there could be other information on the hit, a historical list of Hits looks better as List<Hit> rather than List<int>, it's easier to inspect a hit object during debugging rather than setting watches on player/monster/weapon values).

antialias3• 8 years ago

It isn’t uncommon, nor is it bad design to define value classes that represent simple actions. This enables the action/command/event value to be reified, serialized, transmitted over the wire, deserialized, and potentially processed remotely, asynchronously, or by multiple arbitrary consumers.

fenomas3• 8 years ago

The argument here is that it's far better to have player and monster be simple data structures, and a single function hit(player, monster, weapon).

Naturally it's better to be simple if the logic involved actually is simple, but surely the point of the example is that game logic typically isn't. Hits in games don't just change a hit-point value, they tend to play animations, trigger events, work differently depending on this or that piece of global state, etc.

bassman9000• 8 years ago

And you end up having functions that look like.

hit(player, monster, weapon, damage_modifier, arena, previous_turn, next_turn, global_modifiers)

because the author didn't like, or understood encapsulation.

dragonwriter4• 8 years ago

It strikes me as bad design if something as simple as an action (hit) now needs to become it's own class

Why, it's a noun in the problem domain. Why shouldn't it be a class?

that is instantiated merely to execute a single function and then have to delete itself.

This may be inefficient in some language implementations because of limits of optimization, but there is no fundamental reason that, if that's all you do with it, the compiled code or runtime behavior needs to be much different than if it were just a procedure call.

On the other hand, lots of times you will want to do more than that with actions occurring in the domain then executing them (queueing, logging/serializing, etc.) and having a datatype for the event (a class in class-oriented OOP) supports that.

8note• 8 years ago

I for one, would ocassionally introduce a bug where the monster hits the player instead of the other way around

arriu• 8 years ago

This does read nicely in most cases.

There are minor issues when you venture off and decide that it would be cool if a monsters could damage your weapon. Something like Monster.hits(Weapon).with(Weapon). You'll start wondering if Weapon should inherit from the player base class. If not, you'll spend time wondering how to share the code to keep things dry. Obviously there are many solutions even within OOP, but one might consider looking to ECS to remove code duplication and decouple things.

Lots of good examples in the game programming patterns book: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/component.html

jryan498• 8 years ago

I think damage to the weapon could still be handled in the Hit class, because Hit has a reference to Player and Monster and Weapon. You could even create different types of Hit classes that could execute different kinds of Hit behavior like this.

In that case it may be better to rename it to HitStrategy?

alasdair_4• 8 years ago

You'll start wondering if Weapon should inherit from the player base class.

Probably not. If you want to do that, they should both implement an interface (and perhaps share some code through composition) but code inheritance is likely not the right approach here.

ActingMike• 8 years ago

OOP is here to stay because it is the default model of how we see the world. You actually do not have to teach people to use this, just how to map it to the OOP Software Systems like Java/ C#.

It was great while Moors law still lasted, and to write efficient software was becoming some strange quest for some formula one fields of software like games or other massive workload fields like OS-Wizzardry.

Today, the massive workload is still growing, due to sloppy architectural habits and user demands, but the saviors of parallelization and new chip technologies have not come to rescue the sloppy-devs from the laws of leaky abstraction.

Your code runs on a hardware system.

And currently your code is running out of hardware.

And with that OOP is running out of excuses.

So you would write this. Then it would three months before the shipping be handed to some adult- and this adult will delete it. All of it.

Its full of references, full of class-bloat which will push one another out of the cache. Even though the compiler will try to yank the worst out this mental crutch out of the code. Some references can not be dismissed deterministically, so they will be kept. Which makes it incredible slow.

What replaces it will be a efficient structure, keeping all the chunks necessary for collision detection, in one very array like field.

Over this a Algo traverses, acting with a function, which does not reference non-local stuff, detecting collisions and damage. Allowing not only for a few players- but a workload of players.

It will look very ugly, like C, with inline assembler- ugly, and it will be ready to ship.

naasking7• 8 years ago

OOP is here to stay because it is the default model of how we see the world

A common but false statement. Firstly, there is no standard definition of OOP, only loose sets of features that define various overlapping but disjoint paradigms that some subset of people call OO. So your statement is meaningless as there is no single OOP that we identify as how "people see the world".

Secondly, even given any specific definition of OOP, it's also false. There are many programs that simply aren't suited to OO modelling, because you want to express things as the problem being solved actually requires, and this is often not OO. Sometimes pattern matching is best (compilers), sometimes reactive/event paradigm is best (servers, UIs), and neither of these are OO, as but two examples.

And don't take my word for it, there are a few studies on novice programmers showing quite clearly that event-based temporal reactive primitives are what people find most intuitively natural, ie. when account balance <= O then do some action, which is a declarative reactive action that will execute when that condition becomes true. This is not an OO program in any sense.

fenomas3• 8 years ago

You end up with:
Player.hits(Monster).with(Weapon)

I think games are a particularly pathological case for OOP, and as such probably not a good example for the article's case. But FWIW, the problem with what you describe (and with OOP for games generally) is that game logic tends to be way too polymorphic for code like that. That is, players don't just Hit() monsters, they also hit items, traps, breakable terrain, etc., and they get hit by monsters, by projectiles, maybe explosions, fall damage, etc.

And the dilemma of doing all that in OOP is, you find yourself with 20 different things that can receive a Hit(), that have little in common otherwise. Some have hit points but others don't, some don't have an armor value, some need to receive knockback but others don't even have a physics body, etc. As a result, do you make Hit() accept 20 different types, with special cases for each? Or do you rejigger your class hierarchy so that those 20 classes all inherit from Hittable, etc? Either could work in this or that case, but neither's much fun.

This is all why ECS (or other aspect-based approaches) are so popular for games - they let you define very general "Hit(src, tgt)" chunks of logic, that don't care what type each object is, but can easily query whether or not they have hit points or a physics body.

But again, I think games are a pathological case here and none of this should necessarily be considered an argument against OOP generally.

scarface7410• 8 years ago

I find the fluent style programming to be much more readable. But in OOP you would define an IHittable interface or use AOP like you suggested.

pas3• 8 years ago

ECS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93component%E2%80... for others like me who had no clue.

mannykannot3• 8 years ago

"Then Hit reaches into said objects and deals with changing the HP, and XP."

This is not essentially different from what happens in non-OO code. OO purists would probably object to this as a violation of encapsulation, and would insist on objects receiving a hit performing the update to their state themselves.

Stepping back from this example and considering transactions in general, it is often the case that there are certain constraints to be observed, and in such cases, it is easier to verify the solution if it is done compactly in one function. In such cases, creating a class and instantiating it just to have that function would be pointlessly excessive obeisance to a principle, and making it a singleton would only underscore that point.

iokevins• 8 years ago

Eric Lippert discusses this here (2015):

https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/27/wizards-and-warriors-part...

scarface7410• 8 years ago

First I had to have restraint to not downvote you for making me go down that very interesting 5 post rabbit hole....

Second, in one of the articles I found one of the best quotes I’ve ever heard about when not to use exceptions....

When you’re writing code in the IDE, it is correct code that is the exception!

szastupov• 8 years ago

Player.hits(Monster).with(Weapon)

The problem is that it's an artificial example, in reality you'll ave a lot of different monsters, weapons, and most importantly separate subsystems. I.e. physics processed in one pass, animation in another, same goes for custom logic and rendering.

Modern game engines use component systems that put data first for the same reasons author described in the post.

z3t4• 8 years ago

it's a trap. you don't want to complex objects/classes. keep them simple!

lerno• 8 years ago

Been exactly there with a game. Solution? Take a data centered approach: a command object (just a function really) updates HP, XP, triggers visual effects etc. Monster and Player classes are just thin wrappers around plain data structures.

I tried the more ”OO”-approaches for all too long thinking it would lead me right. It doesn’t.

crazygringo2• 8 years ago

A lot of these initial points I don't think are relevant -- you can model your data in objects, data structures are complex because business needs are complex, data models wind up having implicit graph dependencies as well...

BUT, "cross-cutting concerns" is where I think the main valid argument is. In my experience, OOP is just way too restrictive of a model, by forcing you to shoehorn data and code into an object hierarchy that doesn't reflect the meaning of what's going on.

So I totally agree with the conclusion: just store your data in "dumb" arrays with hash tables or database tables with indices... be extremely rigorous about defining possible states... and then organize your functions themselves clearly with whatever means are at your disposal (files, folders, packages, namespaces, prefixes, arrays, or even data-free objects -- it all depends on what your language does/n't support).

gerbilly• 8 years ago

In my experience, OOP is just way too restrictive of a model...

Maybe, but if it's cross cutting concerns that bother you, just combine OOP with an aspect oriented programming library.

coolaliasbro3• 8 years ago

Exactly! So long as the developer approaches the solution with the expectation of scaling and extensibility from the get, this should not be a problem.

Michaelanjello• 8 years ago

I completely agree. For a DataStore in Python, I may often use a Pandas DataFrame or such. For random label-based access it can have an index too.

Unfortunately, when asked to design an OOP architecture in a job interview, if you don't adhere to its religious enterprisy notions, you can risk failing the interview.

DanielBMarkham• 8 years ago

There's something very important here. It also tends to be overstated. As a former OOP guy, I struggle with explaining what's going on with people that don't see it yet.

Perhaps beginning with praise might work best. OOA as a group analysis tool is probably one of the most powerful things coming out of computer science in the past 50 years. Oddly enough, nobody does it much. Many if the problems this author brings up with OOP actually work for the best in OOA.

It's not all bad. But there are problems with where we are. Big problems. We need to understand them.

ced2• 8 years ago

I've never liked classical OOP much, but multiple dispatch is a lovely paradigm. One doesn't define _classes_ per se, but rather just plain old boring structs.

   struct Player
       xp::Int
   end

   struct Monster
       hp::Int
   end

   function hit(p::Player, m::Monster)
       p.xp += 10
       m.hp -= 20
   end

The nicest thing is how one one doesn't need inheritance to "add a method" to an object. One just defines my_function(s::String) to be whatever, and it doesn't interfere with anyone else's code.

donatj• 8 years ago

Roughly that exact design but with classes was my instant thought.

jcelerier3• 8 years ago

One doesn't define _classes_ per se, but rather just plain old boring structs.

in which language are there differences between classes and structs ?

stevelosh• 8 years ago

Common Lisp

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw70/CLHS/Body/m_defs...

http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/m_defcla.htm

ygra• 8 years ago

Of the languages i know, C++ and C# come to mind. Granted, in C++ the differences are fairly minor and inconsequential at runtime.

wffurr2• 8 years ago

"struct" here is meant in the same sense that the author of the post refers to "PoD objects". Just data in public fields.

Whereas a "class" is usually thought of as private data exposed only through methods.

There is no language that enforces this distinction; it's purely by convention. C++ makes it a little simpler by having a different default access level.

In any case, you are being needlessly pedantic and missing the point.

leiroigh• 8 years ago

Above example is from julia. Julia structs have C layout and have no member functions.

The analog of "classes" in julia are "abstract types"; e.g. `AbstractArray{T}` is anything that implements the AbstractArray interface and holds objects of type T. Abstract types have no instances (all objects have a concrete type, that may be a subtype of an abstract type).

Binary compatibility between class and superclass is a cool feature in many OOP languages. This allows fast dynamic dispatch via vtable and lots of shared binary code for non-virtual methods (you can always memory pun from class to superclass). Julia does not support that feature: your different methods can share source code, but they get compiled separately. This is good for performance (more aggressive inlining) and bad for compiling small shared libraries (it is very painful to create julia apps/libs that work without invoking the JIT-compiler at runtime; can be done via custom sysimg). In some sense, julia is not very well suited to closed source business models.

matwood2• 8 years ago

You're describing the Anemic Domain Model which is quite useful.

iguy• 8 years ago

As a non-OOP-thinker, this seems completely natural to me. The verb hit doesn't belong completely to one noun, so it shouldn't be forced to live within the struct/class with the data (which really is about only that noun).

What problem is solved by forcing the function to belong to one of the actors, as in joe.hit(tiger).with(sword) or something? People say things about encapsulation, but it seems here that hit may change the state of Player, Monster and Weapon, so their states can't be fully private. In this code you can also have hit(p::Player, w::Door), if this were not allowed then perhaps you'd have to have separate hit_player_monster and hit_player_door functions... is that the problem?

jbverschoor• 8 years ago

Ok nice, then you get a huge if tree for all different monsters and weapons.

ubercow13• 8 years ago

How's that any different to a 'classical OOP' approach?

ced2• 8 years ago

What do you mean? It wouldn't be "if". You'd just have

   function hit(p::Player, m::Goblin)
       ...
   end
   function hit(p::Player, o::Ogre)
       ...
   end

In Julia, there's limited inheritance, so you could group monsters in a hierarchy to limit the redundancy (eg. Goblin <: Monster <: Creature). Or you can use multiple dispatch like a trait system, to get even greater flexibility.

vnorilo2• 8 years ago

I find that I generally agree. However, I have the intuition that good data-oriented design requires an exceptionally solid understanding of the problem domain.

You might say that any good design requires that. I'm not going to disagree. But if there's a place for OOP, maybe it is as a preliminary abstraction, something to hold the chaos at bay while we build our understanding of the task at hand.

Of course, preliminary abstraction has a nasty habit of becoming permanent.

LaserToy• 8 years ago

Give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself.

mabbo2• 8 years ago

I'm always confused when people criticize OOP, because most of the time the criticisms they use are just plain bad programming. Or they're using hyperbole that isn't really useful.

You want to know why OOP is useful and common? Because it's easy. Easy things allow for faster development, faster onboarding of devs. Humans need a mental models of things and OOP very explicitly gives it.

But like most easy things, OOP still works well enough even when it's done badly. That's not a bad thing. Working software beats non-working software.

We shouldn't be telling people "stop using OOP! It's only for idiots!". OOP will be here forever. We should be teaching people how to do OOP right, what the pitfalls are that lead to bad design, and how to take badly designed OOP and fix it.

chx• 8 years ago

You want to know why OOP is useful and common? Because it's easy.

With as much proof as you have given, let me offer you a counterargument: it is common because academia loves OOP. It's easy to teach, it's easy to test. It is most decidedly not easy and very often not useful.

My favorite example of how everything falls apart in due time is the color of a car. That's it, right? A car has a color. A Porsche Panamera might be a "carbon grey metallic" and it's stunning, but that's just one color still. Aye, up until the Mini Cooper tells you they need two colors. This world doesn't fit the OOP straightjacket. Your programming course does but the real world doesn't and when it doesn't then pain follows.

devocracy• 8 years ago

Refactor, with the right IDE this should take minutes. OOP witbout something like intellij or VS.NET is not fun.

wedowhatwedo• 8 years ago

Why is color of a car an issue with OOP? Without knowing your the use cases, neither of us will model it correctly for the job at hand.

A car obviously has multiple colors. It has at least two: exterior and interior. Quite often there are two-tone colors. But as a manufacturer, I'm going to guess that each interior and exterior color scheme has an ID. If you are a car manufacturer, the interior and exterior color scheme ID would be all you need.

antialias3• 8 years ago

You seem to be translating a modeling failure into an indictment of the whole object modeling paradigm. Your car model doesn’t account for multi-color liveries? Revise and refactor the model. Adapting to change isn’t the same as falling apart.

mabbo2• 8 years ago

Okay, so how would you model that in a different paradigm? And why could OOP not model that the same way?

Your example also doesn't specify a business context. What kind of software am I building such that I need to model a car and it's color? That simple question will entirely change how the OOP model is designed.

OOP is easy to teach because it's easy to use, to understand. But again, if you use simple poorly thought out OOP, it may work- just badly. And of course there's the problem of "those who can't do, teach" and often those teaching programming are poor programmers.

scarface7410• 8 years ago

In the real world?

If I’m programming in a monolith, I change the Color property to a List and I get a big red dot with the number of errors the change caused in the bottom of my IDE and it tells me all of the places I need to change the code.

If my car class is part of a Nuget package. I change the version number to represent a breaking a change following the standard semver semantics. When the consumer upgrades to the latest package, they either get warnings about Color being obsolete and use Colors instead or I just completely remove the Color property and they get a red dot and change their code or decide they don’t have time and keep the old package around for awhile.

If I’m writing an API, and since I did properly separate my domain model from my view model, I both map the first item in the Colors list to the Color property in my view model and I create another Colors property.

These are solved problems.

fmap• 8 years ago

it is common because academia loves OOP.

Absolutely not! I doubt that anybody was ever taught OOP in an academic PL course, unless it was really an "introduction to programming" course, or their professor was working on this topic at the moment. The meaning of a program in an object oriented language with imperative features and inheritance is not pretty.

There are aspects of object oriented programming that are useful for structuring programs (hidden state) and others which are a recipe for disaster (recursive types). This complexity is always swept under the carpet when teaching OOP. Classes/inheritance/objects are always taught via imperfect analogies, which should tell you everything you need to know about how "easy" OOP really is.

No, the reason it is taught so widely is purely practical. It's a popular paradigm and a lot of practical programming projects might need an OOP background.

---

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not trying to say that OOP is bad per se.

The information hiding and namespacing aspects of objects are really useful, both in theory and in practice. It's just that I think that implementation inheritance is an imperfect way of facilitating code reuse and not something you should teach to new students...

jasode• 8 years ago

it is common because academia loves OOP.

Maybe we're exposed to different evidence but it seems like academia heavily favors non-OOP such as functional programming. Programmers also make repeated citations to SICP class they enjoyed in college but were forced to deal with OOP when they got a real job. It's the commercial industry that pushed OOP. Universities seem very anti-OOP while commercial businesses like Adobe/Microsoft/Google use OOP languages like C++. Other companies that write back office "enterprisey" software also favor OOP languages like Java/C# over non-OOP such as Haskell. I also remember the 1990s when professional programming magazines had monthly articles evangelizing the new thing called "object oriented programming" and you had full-page ads for Turbo C++ and Microsoft C++ that touted its new OOP features.

My favorite example of how everything falls apart in due time is the color of a car. That's it, right? A car has a color. A Porsche Panamera might be a "carbon grey metallic" and it's stunning, but that's just one color still. Aye, up until the Mini Cooper tells you they need two colors. This world doesn't fit the OOP straightjacket.

I don't understand why your example as you've constructed it proves what you want it to prove. If we use your "car color" as a text template to test the validity of other computer science ideas:

Database table paradigm:

  create table car (
    vehicle_id varchar(20), 
    color_code varchar(1)
  );

... but a car like Mini Cooper can have more than one color. The world doesn't fit the relational table straitjacket.

Algebraic data types such as product type:

  struct {
    char vehicle_id[20]; 
    char color_code[1];
  };

... but a car like Mini Cooper can have more than one color. The world doesn't fit the algebraic data types straitjacket. The world also doesn't fit structs. It doesn't fit the char data type, or array of chars, and so on.

It seems like your example applies to any and all computer science concepts that attempt to model real-world data so maybe I'm missing something?

segmondy4• 8 years ago

It's not OOP that's the problem, but your mental model. There's no OOP language that says a car has to have one color.

You can define an object to have more than one color, or maybe instead of having a color have a color pattern. How creative is your imagination? If you use a tuple of (r, g, b) to represent color in a functional language, you will still have the same problem when you realize you can have multiple colors or design patterns. if your mental model has a mismatch with the real world, you will have problem at some point.

fermienrico• 8 years ago

New to OOP programming. Could you explain what sort of arguments are presented against using OOP? I am genuinely curious.

hliyan4• 8 years ago

I've been programming for 15 years (so I was around for the rise of OOP). There's nothing fundamentally wrong with OOP. I still write a lot of classes. But what I haven't written in a almost a decade: code with inheritance, encapsulation or polymorphism. Nothing has exploded.

Also, objects are best when used to represent actual objects (i.e. collections of data rather than collections of functions).

This is OK

    User user = new User("John");

But this:

    StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(str, ",");
    while (st.hasMoreElements()) {
      System.out.println(st.nextElement());
    }

Might not be as clean as:

   stdout(tokenize(str, ",")); // functions are hypothetical

timbit423• 8 years ago

The best arguments against OOP, as it is done in most languages today, are made by Alan Kay, the creator of Smalltalk and the term "object-oriented". Alan should have used the term "message passing" so people wouldn't miss this component of Smalltalk that made it so great.

"I invented the term object-oriented, and I can tell you that C++ wasn't what I had in mind." - Alan Kay, Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY&t=634s

jstimpfle11• 8 years ago

Yes, OOP is easy. At least the layers of sedimentary cruft were comparatively easy to write. The parts that actually do something, not easier in the slightest. It's still procedural code that must move data. (Usually that code is much less straightforward in OOP because it has to deal with so much boilerplate that is in the way of accessing the actual data).

zbentley• 8 years ago

The parts that actually do something

This comes up a lot, and I think there's a broken assumption here. The core business logic of a product "actually does something", to be sure. But that doesn't mean that all the other code is somehow less important or pointless. Code that allows multiple people to work on the same abstractions in slightly different ways "actually does something" too--it facilitates cooperation and interoperation. Test code "actually does something" too--it helps prevent issues and ensure quality.

All of those things can be done wrong (core algorithms can have bugs, abstractions/interfaces can confuse people, tests can lie/test the wrong things), but they're all equally necessary in many cases. I think the misconception about non-core-procedure code being "cruft" automatically comes about because very early on in small projects, you don't need much more than the core. But when projects grow (to more people or just more code), other goals, like standardization/maintainability/extensibility/testability, become just as important as the goals of the core: if your added engineering staff can't add value to the company, or if your software is fatally buggy, it doesn't matter how good the shape of the original core-ideas code is, you'll lose money.

gameswithgo2• 8 years ago

No true Scotsman.

Because it's easy

There are lots of cases when forcing yourself to stick to OOP styles or programming is much less easy. You could look at various comparisons of code line counts of equivalent programs between C# and F# code as some basic examples.

I don't mind having classes that can inherit available in a language, but languages like Java and C# that force you to use only those things leads to a lot of unecessary boilerplate. You can work around this with static classes full of static functions that you can treat as 'modules' full of free functions. Which, is what I do a lot :D

But I wish I didn't have to bother with that workaround.

mpweiher• 8 years ago

You could look at various comparisons of code line counts of equivalent programs between C# and F# code as some basic examples.

People have done this methodically, and the results may surprise you:

http://www.cs.bsu.edu/homepages/dmz/cs697/langtbl.htm

That's the one from 1996, there was a newer one that pretty much confirmed the results.

scarface7410• 8 years ago

I agree. Even in Domain Driven Design, sometimes you just have transaction scripts. Call a spade a spade and write your code accordingly.

zippy5• 8 years ago

I would suggest that boilerplate is small price to pay for having a compiler enforce design discipline and conventions. Remember that code should be written for both the run time environment and next coder who will have to understand it. Constraints enforced in java often make it easier for the next dev. I suspect part of this is that in unconstrained languages, there are so many ways of doing the same thing that pattern recognition become more difficult for all but the most experienced programmers.

letstrynvm• 8 years ago

It's maybe confusing because you are presupposing OOP as the default. Humans tend to observe some situation and sythesize stories to explain it, even when it comes to observing their own actions.

I don't mean to unfairly paraphrase but to transpose what you wrote so it shows these stories you are telling yourself

- usually people criticising OOP are "bad programmers"

- OOP is easy, alternatives are hard

- Even if OOP model is a bad fit, it's still a model and the extra devs needed to solve its bad fit can easily be chained to the oars

- If OOP makes trouble, it was because it was "done badly"

- Most easy things work well enough even if "done badly" (that is just not true)

- If OOP can be cobbled together to work at all, it is justified since that justifies anything

If you consider a simpler proposition like, "this can be done in a few hundred or thousand lines of C99 instead of latest C++ and boost", I think there is just no valid reason to bring OOP into it.

scarface7410• 8 years ago

Even when I was writing C, I had different modules in different files, only exposed certain functions via the header files and had structs with function pointers that did different things based on how the struct was initialized.

This was before I knew anything about OOP. How is this any different than object oriented programming?

PopeDotNinja• 8 years ago

You want to know why OOP is useful and common? Because it's easy.

Try rewriting that without adjectives. Engineers are very convincible, but they need evidence. Personally, I don't find OOP to be particularly useful or easy.

Check this out... "I became a much better programmer when I started writing functional code. Now I tend to write OOP code in a functional way, but learning how to do that was and not easy, and I am not sure most would find it useful." By saying that, I'm basically taking a position that's the opposite of yours, and while it's true to me, it provides no evidence for you to help you evaluate my side of the conversation.

e40• 8 years ago

My problem with OOP is debugging it when things go wrong.

naasking7• 8 years ago

I'm always confused when people criticize OOP, because most of the time the criticisms they use are just plain bad programming

Every paradigm can implement any type of program needed, in principle. The point of criticising a paradigm is to argue to what extent that paradigm encourages that bad programming you mention. If OOP naturally frames problems in a way that leads most people to bad solutions for common problems, that's a legitimate criticism.

dragonwriter4• 8 years ago

OOP will be here forever

Being the overwhelmingly dominant paradigm of the nineties and early oughts, largely because it was better for large scale programming than simple procedural and got bolted on in a very backwards compatible way to the overwhelmingly dominant procedural language of the immediately preceding period doesn't mean it is going to be around, in a significant way, forever.

You want to know why OOP is useful and common?

Path dependence, its superiority for large products over what was dominant just before, the dominance of C before OOP became common, and the near simultaneous introduction of C++ and Objective-C which framed the debate about how to move beyond C (which C++ won, which is why not only is OOP dominant, but static class-based OOP on the C++ model, both strucurally and syntactically, is dominant within OOP.)

atoav4• 8 years ago

Sometimes there is just no right way when it comes to using OOP. Sure OOP is often a hammer that will make everything look like nails, but for some problems it really just isn’t the right approach at all.

For a very good example when this is indeed the case, watch (or read!) this amazing talk by kyren on Game ECS: https://kyren.github.io/2018/09/14/rustconf-talk.html

jryan498• 8 years ago

Encouraging complexity

Picking a satire piece on how something can be abused is not a great argument of "this thing is bad".

For example, I'd argue anything written in an OOP language is going to be more readable than this (from the obfuscated C contest) https://www.ioccc.org/2018/algmyr/prog.c

Also, complex systems tend to benefit from OOP because complex systems can have multiple combinations of behaviors. Something IMO OOP is useful for.

Const-me4• 8 years ago

OOP is not a silver bullet but for some classes of problems it's the best tool available.

That's the reason why all good rich GUI frameworks are OOP-based, including HTML DOM we use on the web. GPU APIs, OS kernel APIs are OOP-based as well.

mercer6• 8 years ago

I don't necessarily disagree, but wouldn't you agree that libraries like React seem to pull GUI's toward a more FP approach?

Const-me4• 8 years ago

This react? https://reactjs.org/ Their web site says following:

Component-Based
Build encapsulated components that manage their own state, then compose them to make complex UIs.

Wouldn't you agree that components managing their own state is a textbook definition of OOP?

They even have inheritance-based examples on their main page:

class HelloMessage extends React.Component

corebit2• 8 years ago

Data is more important than code

Nope. Right there at the beginning is where the author goes off track.

Computation itself is the most important aspect of computing. Code and data are just complexity to manage.

Do I have a Customer? It goes into class Customer. Do I have a rendering context? It goes into class RenderingContext.

I whole heartedly agree with this. The naive approach to domain modelling is to classify the primitives of a domain into classes and stop there. In actuality, the processor of those primitives is likely what your class should be, and those primitives ought to be methodless data structures.

I.e., OrderFulfiller instead of Customer and Part classes.

matwood2• 8 years ago

I disagree. SICP says "“In programming, we deal with two kinds of elements: procedures and data.” If we reduce that further it is really just data.

corebit2• 8 years ago

There is no one without the other.

The data is unintelligible randomness without some algorithm to process it

The code cant exist without some data schema to reference and has no value if there's no data instances to process.

coldtea7• 8 years ago

Computation itself is the most important aspect of computing. Code and data are just complexity to manage.

Of course you're gonna write some computation, else there would be no program. That's not the point here.

First, author doesn't mean "data" as in what comes in, it means the data structures of a program.

Second, for the purposes of designing a program (and its computation part) data structures are a better guiding principle than objects. That's the argument being made.

coolaliasbro3• 8 years ago

"I whole heartedly agree with this. The naive approach to domain modelling is to classify the primitives of a domain into classes and stop there. In actuality, the processor of those primitives is likely what your class should be, and those primitives ought to be methodless data structures."

This is what I did not have the ability to articulate as well in an earlier comment. As far as I understand parent, the takeaway is that often OOP goes astray when the developer is unable to identify that a given need can be handled by generics/a parent class and instead instantiates their own class.

alasdair_4• 8 years ago

OOP programs tend to only grow and never shrink because OOP encourages it.

Most long-lived programs tend to grow, because people add new features to them. This isn't something unique to OOP.

As for growth of OOP programs in particular - does no one ever refactor anything? Shrinking OOP code through refactoring is a daily occurrence at almost every job I've ever had.

bunderbunder• 8 years ago

I'm not sure that I agree 100% with all the points raised in this article, though that's possibly just a reaction to what reads to me as invective.

Here's another bit of food for thought along those lines, though: If you take all the elements of what's typically considered to be good object-oriented design to their logical extremes, you end up with a bunch of objects that each have exactly one operation, and are configured at construction time. They may have some very simple internal state (think counters and caches), but you probably want to keep that to a minimum.

The end result starts to look very, very similar to functional programming. An interface with one method is essentially a function. Constructor arguments do basically the same job as closures. Etc.

When you're looking at things from that perspective, the big difference is that functional languages almost force you to work that way, whereas it takes consistent, conscious effort to do it in OOP.

kumarvvr• 8 years ago

I didn’t try to forget OOP per se, but I slowly adopted the authors guidelines regarding a data first approach. Now most of my objects are just wrappers around data, rather than analogies to real world objects.

However I mostly am working on web apps so maybe this approach is more suitable to such apps.

When working on desktop apps, during my initial days as a programmer, I found OOP based ui systems easy to grasp, but then this could be due to lack of experience.

akerl_• 8 years ago

"One must never change the order here!"

This is presented as a basic truth and then not really backed up, as far as I can tell. Why must I apply the order as the author believes?

koonsolo2• 8 years ago

A language has 2 main purposes:

1. communication

2. representation of concepts

1 is pretty obvious, and for a programming language this means communication between a person to a computer

2 might not be as clear, but if you know that people cannot count in languages that have no numbers, it becomes obvious. There is a tribe that only has 0, 1 and many, and guess what, they can't tell the difference between 7 and 8.

Now back to programming languages and their communication between computer and programmer: the old programming languages were very close to the computer. As languages evolved, they started to be become 'human', where it is easier for us to read and write them.

OOP in that sense leans very close to concepts of normal humans. Objects, things objects can do, objects have separate responsibilities, etc. It's easy for a human to have such a model inside his head, because we already do this every day.

Now as a programmer, most of the things that I need to do is make a representation of the real world into a program. Since the real world is made up of things that do stuff, it's easy to model it in such a concept.

Most arguments against OOP always come from either a theoretical or academic background.

But in the real world, with real companies, real problems to solve and real programmers, OOP is used. Because it lends itself really well for representing the real world in a computer model.

EDIT: not saying that anyone that doesn't use OOP isn't a real programmer. But those people are more into the algorithmic or mathematical problem space, not a problem space where a real-world concept needs to be modeled. Most software is like the latter, and therefore most programs are OO. Is it the best solution for everything? Definitely not.

hliyan4• 8 years ago

  OOP in that sense leans very close to concepts of normal humans. 
  Objects, things objects can do, objects have separate responsibilities, etc.

This is not entirely accurate. Human languages are closer to functional languages: they have verbs that operate on nouns. Verbs are not attached to nouns, but rather, the operation of the verb is dependent on the noun.

koonsolo2• 8 years ago

Yet OOP reads more like English and functional programming more like math.

dwaltrip• 8 years ago

I think the claim may have been that the brain is usually doing something more akin to "noun.verb(...)", rather than "verb(noun, ...)".

It's a very interesting question. The concepts of agency and intention are very important in human cognition. If we hear a sound, we wonder if some intentional agent (predator, enemy, etc) that we need to be aware of caused the sound. Or if it was something inanimate like the wind rustling a tree.

The OOP paradigm seems to map more closely to agents taking action. But perhaps my speculations aren't well grounded. I'm not sure.

jcolella• 8 years ago

Interesting article. Though, the article should provide alternatives and speak to how use other types of programming paradigms might solve the issues that the person in the article is stating.

makecheck• 8 years ago

OO bugs that I see are actually in the “invisible” parts of objects, as these require more experience to know what is really going on. For example, failing to implement necessary operators (or worse, implementing them in ways that are subtly incorrect). Knowing how to implement object “glue” properly is something that just doesn’t come up if you’re using simpler programming styles, and in cases like these it’s better to pick the simplest and most maintainable approach that will suit the task to avoid pitfalls.

3pt14159• 8 years ago

At its core, every software is about manipulating data to achieve a certain goal
This part is very important, so I will repeat. goal -> data architecture -> code.

Wait, what? No. That isn't what you just said. You said my goal was my goal and manipulating the data was the way to achieve that goal.

Take Shopify. They had a goal: Make a ton of money by running ecommerce stores.

They used OOP. They IPO'd and they're doing great.

You can argue all you want about how they would have done better if they'd done some other programming style, but the reality is that almost every startup that I see win in fields like Shopify's (where there are a ton of different concerns with their own, disparate implementation specificities[0]) do so with OOP codebases.[1]

In large corps like Google non-OOP with typed languages like Go might work great. Streams of data and all that. But for startups it's too slow. OOP is agile because you get some data and you can ask it "what can you do?" and you can trick functional or logical programming languages into kinda doing that too, but they do it poorly.

[0] Even wording this in a non-OO way was a stupid waste of time. I could have just said "different models and methods" and 99% of the people here would have nodded and the 1% would have quibbled.

[1] Some startups like WhatsApp are a bit of an exception, but even YouTube used Python.

harimau777• 8 years ago

When I'm coding, I often find myself in a situation where, in order to reach my goal, I need to use a "bad" language tool (e.g. eval), violate some principle of good coding (e.g. avoiding side effects), or just have to write ugly code. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of writing good code comes down to recognizing those situations and stepping back to find a way you can change your design or strategy to avoid needing the ugly code.

I've never quite liked OOP, but I struggle to say exactly why. I wonder if some of it is that the class structure and hierarchies makes it difficult to step back and change the design in order to avoid having to write ugly code.

anothergoogler• 8 years ago

Instead of a well-designed data store, OOP projects tend to look like a huge spaghetti graph of objects pointing at each other and methods taking long argument lists.

Uh, what? FP projects are the ones with crazy argument lists, has OP even heard of the Law of Demeter? Does FP magically prohibit a huge spaghetti graph of functions and ad-hoc types pointing at each other?

The main point is: just because my software operates in a domain with concepts of eg. Customers and Orders, doesn't mean there is any Customer class, with methods associated with it.

What an observation, it's all a bucket of bits so why name anything? Rub your hands together, mutter an incantation and voila, software without all that obnoxious structure!

arunc• 8 years ago

1. Stop teaching OOP with C++. 2. Document the anti patterns.

OOP is not bad otherwise. I can't see how GUI frameworks can be easy and powerful without OOP.

mromanuk• 8 years ago

the Customer concept is just a bunch of data in a tabular form in one or more DataStores, and “business logic” code manipulates the data directly.

where lives this business logic? are different functions accessing the same data and modifying it? problems appears.

jmartrican• 8 years ago

I think for enterprise type software OOP works well. It easily allows us to re-use code and solve common problems once in a parent class and have that solution easily propagated to child classes.

However, when developing a video game, I ran into quite a few OO design conundrums that IMO were the hardest programming problems to solve in my career. I started looking into data driven design, and while I never changed my code to implement it, it looked like it might have been easier for the video game. I do not know for sure. But I do know that getting OO right in the video game I was implementing was daunting. Maybe I was doing it wrong. The one issue we kept running into was how to design it so that the flow of dependencies flowed in one direction. That is to say, classes should not require references to classes that were higher up the food chain, and vice versa. It sucked when you realize that your Bullet class requires a reference to the BattleField class when the BattleField object was not being passed down through all the intermediate objects that separated the two. I would be willing to say that it could have been poor design, or rather not realizing that dependency earlier in the process to deal with it. But many things we did not know till the requirement or change came up. Then it was programming somersaults to deal with it. Eventually we did get better at re-arranging things as things came up, basically we got used to having to change a lot of the design at a drop of a dime.

I do not know if data driven design would have helped, but it did sound like it was worth a shot. I must admit though, I do remember a data driven program i worked on, and it bothered me how much data had to be passed around that was not relevant to the method/class that was using it. And a lot of data got lumped together out of convenience.

jtdev• 8 years ago

“OOP apologists will respond that it's a matter of developer skill, to keep abstractions in check.”

In my experience, the proliferation and use of ORMs makes keeping abstractions in check nearly impossible... in fact, I see ORM use as the primary design decision leading to the bastardization and convolution of sound OOP design.

segmondy4• 8 years ago

The conversion is about OOP, not ORM

segmondy4• 8 years ago

I think most people forget that Edsger W. Dijkstra was a computer scientist not a software engineer. He most likely wrote programs, but not build software systems. As much as I've enjoyed most of his writings and musings, one must bear in mind that they most likely apply to programs not software systems built in the large. If you are writing one little program and have one type of data, it's easy to begin with data. When you have a complex system operating on 500 different types of data, it becomes easier to encapsulate with OOP.

dmitripopov• 8 years ago

Encapsulation never was my favorite aspect of OOP too, in fact I always try to create different classes for data and code - it brings in a lot of benefits. But OOP patterns described by GoF are brilliant things in terms of code reuse and maintenance costs.

hota_mazi5• 8 years ago

Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California. — Edsger W. Dijkstra

I don't understand why Dijkstra gets quoted so often when he has been demonstrably wrong on so many topics (see his opinion on BASIC too) and he was such a dogmatic and unreasonable person overall.

hota_mazi5• 8 years ago

OOP is successful because it's very good at modeling the world that surrounds us. As much as people like to hate on inheritance and recommending composition instead (a reasonable advice), the bottom line is that you will encounter the pitfalls of inheritance only on very rare occasions.

And inheritance enables so much flexibility and ease of maintenance that nothings comes close to it, not even FP.

Specialization and polymorphism(s) are the reasons why OOP is around, successful, and will remain so for a while. Anyone pretending it's bad or broken is just click baiting and does not understanding the fundamental issues.

VLM2• 8 years ago

Sometimes the best way to decide what to do, is a OOP-like 100,000 line long legal code. Sometimes the best way to decide what to do, is something short and sweet yet possibly not entirely clear, like the Ten Commandments. When what the original designers chose was correct, everything will work quickly and reliably. When they don't, you'll suffer for a long time. Given that, you'll spend almost all of your wall clock time suffering and complaining about the designers selection being wrong. With a side effect of most of your suffering will be due to poorly implemented examples of the dominant paradigm. "AKA OOP SUX"

In summary, given all of the above, there are two true statements that OOP works AND simultaneously you'll spend almost all of your mental effort on OOP not working. Generally, OOP being inappropriately hyper dominant at this time, means that non-OOP solutions will utterly master some very low hanging fruit for first movers who abandon OOP.

I've seen some truly horrific object relational mappers trying to connect OOP to inherently functional software APIs, hardware device interfaces, "chronological engineering" in general, and persistent data stores. Not surprising if you're working in those areas, abandoning OOP will lead to massive success.

oliwarner• 8 years ago

It's crazy how passionately people get behind their preferred paradigm. I think they all have a place, and can all be abused severely.

I'm all for people —at least those who don't answer to me— picking one and running with it, but if you're going to try and tear another one down, at least make sure you understand what it does for the people that like it. TFA's author does not appear to.

theFatemaLive• 8 years ago

Learning and developing projects in Distributed Systems using Elixir made me realise the same..

ttty• 8 years ago

The vast majority of essential code is not operating on just one object – it is actually implementing cross-cutting concerns. Example: when class Player hits() a class Monster, where exactly do we modify data? Monster's hp has to decrease by Player's attackPower, Player's xps increase by Monster's level if Monster got killed. Does it happen in Player.hits(Monster m) or Monster.isHitBy(Player p). What if there's a class Weapon involved? Do we pass it as an argument to isHitBy or does Player has a currentWeapon() getter?

You have a function that has access to these objects. Based on that it will update the player and monster.

    Function onAttack(from as player, to as monster, weapon) 
    player.addXp(weapon.xp)
    monster.addHealth(-weapon.damage)

Probably you'll want to have immutable data instead of mutating this.

(I'm on mobile so I can't put too much code)

The reason you do this is to decouple code. You don't want the player to be aware of the monster, at least not in this scenario.

dragonwriter4• 8 years ago

For concurrency and multi-threading, I typically glue different logical components via message passing

There's a word for the programming paradigm where you glue logical components together via message passing...

jabajabadu• 8 years ago

This article seems to fit the template: Here are some abstract reasons why paradigm X is bad, and here is a class of problems that have a more straightforward solution in paradigm Y, therefore paradigm Y is better than X.

The real message here is that if you have a problem that nicely maps onto a relational database then use the database-like approach instead of OOP.

In my domain, I work on algorithms for a very specialized class of graphs whose structure and manipulation must obey a diverse set of constraints. I have tried implementing the core ideas using multiple popular paradigms but so far I did not find anything better than OOP.

dejaime• 8 years ago

I pretty much believe that all we have are bad solutions. OOP is a bad solution that is acceptable at a set of problems. Data oriented designs is an also bad solution that is acceptable at a set of problems. Anyone who has ever used any paradigm for big projects can do a write-up about how bad that paradigm is.

The problem of OOP is not OOP, but actually knowing only OOP. That creates a lot of hammer and nail problems. The same would be true if data-oriented had the same popularity, and everything was data oriented.

So, unless you ARE going to give me a __good__ solution, a silver bullet, it is silly to state that a whole paradigm is an absolute inferior. Especially when all you can give me is examples of bad paradigm-tech-problem matches or snippets of incompetent usage.

coolaliasbro3• 8 years ago

This is coming from a business consultant (BA/PM and configuration primarily), but in my experience, it seems like the OOP paradigm is fine in most cases and is leveraged in a functional/compositional fashion typically, so I fail to see the issue with OOP a paradigm. Generics and polymorphism can be used to basically create a functional system that only uses domain specific classes to handle edge cases.

In short, OOP as currently used, in my experience working on numerous RIA/municipal/county government enterprise document management systems, seems perfectly adequate to the tasks at hand and can be used in an effectively functional way.

smnplk2• 8 years ago

What is the point of OOP then, if you are using it in a functional way ? This just proves author's point.

Do you truly use it in a functional way though, that would mean, that you care about separation of state and identity. If you are mostly using immutable collectons/objects with pure functions, then it's fine, but this is not OO.

smnplk2• 8 years ago

Reading some of the comments here reminded me of a great talk by Stuart Halloway called Narcissistic Design.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEZv-kQUSi4

luord• 8 years ago

Most of the problems pointed out can be reduced into "confusing indirection as abstraction", which is a sin of many OOP developers, particularly those obsessed with design patterns.

IMO, OOP is not inherently any more flawed than any other paradigm.

ricardobeat• 8 years ago

This claim is not refuting any of the points presented.

flavio81• 8 years ago

Well, obviously the guy is not using Lisp(or Julia), because his problems are easily solved by multiple dispatch.

Blame mediocre OOP languages (Java & friends), not OOP itself.

rafaelvasco• 8 years ago

Don't know why people keep insisting on this. OOP is a model. Functional is a model. Data oriented is a model. We as programmers just have to use them , in the most effective way possible to architect a solution to a problem. No one model of those can substitute any other. They complement themselves. There is bad OOP and effective OOP, just as there is bad Functional and effective Functional. The models are never bad by themselves. The programmers are. Any programmer that bashes OOP in favor of any other model is just making a fool of himself and exposing his ingenuity.

in9• 8 years ago

I really think these kind of articles are valuable in the sense that they make us question the way we code our applications.

But I still think it's too easy to point to a problem without discussing possible solutions. I know the functional paradigm, focused on data streams and procedures, is where he is pointing at. But how does this facilitate the graph reference problem, for example?

The thing with oop, besides that is easy, is that is diffuse. Any o'll tutorial will have an order+client example.

ffanon• 8 years ago

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850210 "Was object-oriented programming a failure?"

The faster you unlearn OOP, the better for you and your software

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