OO is not Computing, Newer is not More modern

http://ormomg.blogspot.se/2012/04/oo-computing-newer-more-modern.html

by hencjo • 14 years ago

47 98 14 years ago

ormomg.blogspot.se

marcusf• 14 years ago

I would like to meet one of these fantastical java-only OO-proponents that are often brought up in posts like this, claiming that Java and OO are the end-all of programming. To be honest, I never have.

Some people seem to have a disposition to modeling problems with objects, but I fear I'm too young to have ever met any Java zealots. To me they seem more like straw men invented to help set up posts like this one.

groovy2shoes5• 14 years ago

There are a lot of Java-only OO-proponents in the corporate world.

arunmur• 14 years ago

There are equally large number of people who hate Java for no good reasons. Its all the effect of "Once a fan boy always a fan boy".

babarock2• 14 years ago

Agreed with parent. Come take a stroll in my office; I work in a coporate bank. Most of my coworkers learned "real" programming in the 90s, when Java was the hot new thing on the block. To most of them, the whole Programming Language eco-system can be summarized to an endless "C++ vs Java vs C#" flamewar.

Just yesterday a colleague of mine looked at me with chock and awe when I told him I enjoy coding in C. "But... it's not OO!" he mumbled, puzzled.

Pushing the caricature a little further, Python and Ruby are toy languages that only hipsters use, Perl is only to be used by the sysadmin down the hall, and Lisp is the biggest failed experiment programmers ever came up with.

Pointy-haired bosses encourage this kind of thinking: They would never get in trouble for chosing a language amongst the big 3 (C++/C#/Java).

I once heard someone say: "I don't understand why there are still new languages coming out every day. Shouldn't everyone just use Java?"

richbradshaw• 14 years ago

There are a lot of people who think like this. It does seem to be more enterprisey people generally who are working with large older codebases. I'm not sure how many people would design a product from ground up only using Java today.

UK-AL16• 14 years ago

Maybe people who don't care how trendy the language is? There are thousands of well tested, well maintained libraries for java mainly because of the funding from the corporate world.

What was the first API for amazon aws in? Java. Nearly everything has Java API because it is so well supported.

Java developers don't get off on, programming language one upmanship. Some people like being boring...

SAP? Jave API. Oracle? Java APIs. Google Stuff? Java APIs. Android? Java APIs

nearly every piece of commercial software has java apis.

I remember having to use a 3rd party django paypal plugin and it was half broken(IPN callbacks), that would be unlikely with Java. Ended up faffing about in its source code to get it working.

pjmlp6• 14 years ago

Many people do.

What is the business value for rewriting the code in the flavor of the month language?

In what sense does it improve profit?

option_greek• 14 years ago

You should get interviewed for enterprise jobs sometime. It's all about objects, patterns and lots of factories... some times makes me wonder if we intentionally make stuff complex to find meaning in what we do.

Ingaz• 14 years ago

I've met a lot. Java, .NET, C++ guys.

Sometimes it's hard to convince them that even particular OO-flavor is not the end of the road.

C++ - guys thinking that OO in C++ is the best, java-guys thinking that extensions methods ruins OO in C#, all of them looking with horror in python. (Where's my private and protected??)

huggyface3• 14 years ago

Almost all of the observations you read on programmer blogs are summarized in this academic piece - http://www.theonion.com/articles/sociologist-considers-own-b... [Aside - I had a faint memory of that article, having only read it when it first came out, but managed to find it via a domain-filtered search with cognac and trend, the only two words I could remember from the article. Thought that memory cluster was humorous]

Usually it's someone responding to some personal issue with a public post. Perhaps they argued with a peer.

I also found it to be a serious mental bender to see OO and Java called "new", relative to "old". In most programming groups Java is the new Cobol, considered anything but new. Often it is a legacy language.

eli_gottlieb4• 14 years ago

Strangely, Java is a legacy language, but also the lingua franca of the largest, most prestigious tech companies.

arethuza• 14 years ago

I was a total Java zealot from about '95 to about '00 when I was pretty much your standard architecture astronaut in a startup environment (back when Java was "cool").

Totally reformed now - I hope.

reitzensteinm• 14 years ago

I went to university starting 2004 for an electrical engineering degree, and our programming classes were basically structured around OO Java as a panacea.

Later in life, listening to the Berkeley SICP lectures made me realize what a joke the whole thing was.

I don't think Java OO zealots are a straw man. I think they're very common, and many of us are living in a happy Hacker News and startup bubble, where people we meet are surprisingly competent.

UK-AL16• 14 years ago

SICP/Scheme is usually taught as a first language(To blow their mind) for cs students, then eventually they get taught Java anyway at most universities...

ajuc5• 14 years ago

When I was at university (early '00) the default opinion was that OO is the way to go, and everything other is obsolete or esoteric.

I thought that way then, too. I remember complaining with my friends to teacher that he teaches us algorithms and data structures in procedural Turbo Pascal, when everybody knows it's obsolete, and we should be doing everything in C++ or Java. Yeah, I was clueless, and that particular prof. was right.

But most teachers were OO fundamentalists, and it was assumed everything should be OO. One stupid exercise - design system to keep data about students and teachers on university, using OO.

And the answer was obviously - Student and Teacher class extending Person class. No matter that sometimes people are studying on 2 facoulties, sometimes Student is also a Teacher, or becomes Teacher after he graduates. And when we could use relational DB, it was always with ORM, because objects are needed in any modern system.

UK-AL16• 14 years ago

"Student is also a Teacher, or becomes Teacher after he graduates" - That's the result of not using composition...

"No matter that sometimes people are studying on 2 facoulties" -- Why doesn't this work? Just use a collection, several students inside a collection object...

"And when we could use relational DB, it was always with ORM, because objects are needed in any modern system." - Because you manually want to populate objects with tons of boilerplate?

Just sounds like results of bad design in general, not OO...

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

Go to LinkedIn, search for Java in jobs around you, find the ones that look more boring and apply. Enjoy the perplexity when you offer a non-OO solution to a problem.

v0cab6• 14 years ago

Depends on how old you are perhaps?

I remember being told that my way would work but wasn't OO enough, and because of that it was wrong i.e. I hadn't done well on that portion of the interview.

gbog• 14 years ago

Would be interesting to know what non-OO means precisely. I am reading SICP right now and a bit confused: functional programming is not newer, nor more powerful. It just easier to debug. (It seems)

stonemetal• 14 years ago

I work with one, it isn't hard to get him to start the this isn't OO it is complete and utter crap routine. To be fair to him though we just inherited a large code base of low quality. He turns out good code, but is mostly a 501 programmer.

batista• 14 years ago

>I would like to meet one of these fantastical java-only OO-proponents that are often brought up in posts like this, claiming that Java and OO are the end-all of programming. To be honest, I never have.

Strange, because I have met many of them.

As well as many VB jockeys, who would look at you with a blank stare if you mentioned either OO or functional programing.

Maybe you should work in bad companies more ;-)

epo• 14 years ago

So what you're saying is you are too young to have a real opinion about the article because you don't have enough experience. Instead you invent a strawman to attack some other alleged strawmen

ericHosick• 14 years ago

I've been looking into different software engineering methodologies and it seems that all of them rely on specialization. I think this leads to un-necessary complexity.

OOP might not be more modern but I think it was trying to move into the direction of less specialization. Unfortunately, it has gotten side tracked.

fauigerzigerk5• 14 years ago

"Lots of so called object oriented languages have setters and when you have an setter on an object you turned it back into a data structure."

That may be because data structures is what we actually need. Data structures largely determine the computational complexity of operations and I think it makes little sense to act as if we could always think in terms of abstract responsibilities, interfaces, encapsulation, message passing, etc.

These things are useful organizational principles for coping with large systems, but at the core of most large systems is some algorithmic transformation of one data structure into another.

xyzzyz2• 14 years ago

I think that the point here is that while data structures are objects, not every object should act like a data structure.

fauigerzigerk5• 14 years ago

That's a much better way of putting it than the original quote.

groovy2shoes5• 14 years ago

Keep in mind that when Alan Kay says "object" he means something different from programmers-at-large. To the general population of programmers, an object is just a data structure that's been bundled with some behavior. To Kay, an object is a computational entity that can only send/receive messages (what Carl Hewitt called an actor even before Smalltalk was on the scene). In Kay's mind, objects do not expose state the way they commonly do in the mainstream.

officialchicken• 14 years ago

Modernism (bauhaus/destijl) is about 100 years old.

Why is it so hard to understand that there is an implicit set of limitations based on the tools (and/or materials) we use in our projects?

Think skyscraper... now think wooden skyscraper.

16s• 14 years ago

That's why I like C++ so much. It doesn't force OO down your throat. It lets you program using whatever style is best suited for the job.

v0cab6• 14 years ago

That's why I like C so much.

UK-AL16• 14 years ago

Yeah, but in C you end up creating your own data structures from scratch every time. You can use data structure libraries, but without generics or something similar, it makes it difficult....

Then sometimes actually getting a external c libary to build(If it's not in the package manager) is sometimes trouble. ./configure ./make usually ends up in some obsercure error or depedency... C++ usually makes the errors even more unreadable...

udp• 14 years ago

I also take or leave C++ language features as required, and I wish more people shared your point of view.

Among the C++ crowd (particularly over at Stack Overflow) there's this infuriating attitude that any code that doesn't use std::string, std::vector or boost::magic_super_auto_ptr is language sacrilege and the developer should be burned with fire because it's not C++ it's C and malloc is deprecated and arrays are deprecated, and, and...

UK-AL16• 14 years ago

That's because without using these things, people can end up accidently shooting themselves foot quite easily. Like accidentally removing the end character from a char* string...

Normal malloc, and dealloc can get stupidly complicated when lots of other objects reference one memory location, which is why these referencing auto pointers come in, with built bounds checking etc

Using those things is defensive programming.

v0cab6• 14 years ago

Did you mean to respond to my post?

I agree with what you said. I tried hard to use C++ language features (especially STL) in a previous job and it was more hassle than it was worth, honestly.

guard-of-terra• 14 years ago

"ORMs are newer and hipper than those old boring outdated relational databases?" I stopped reading after this point since author obviously doesn't understand what he's talking about.

fauigerzigerk5• 14 years ago

What does he not understand?

esteth• 14 years ago

an ORM is a library to map objects onto a relational database. They're not a substitute for databases themselves, but a substitute for a DB interaction library.

ie: To use an ORM you must use a relational database. Things like mongoose exist, but they're not ORMs since they don't map objects to a relational database.

swalsh• 14 years ago

Most of object oriented programming to me feels like nothing more than trying to decide the best place to put something. As time goes on though, typically the 3rd iteration, there just is no good place to put this new thing. A redesign would be best, but I only have 1 week to finish this new feature.

So a project (well at least in my experience) progresses like this: "Wonderful architecture" > "glad I designed this project well, its' paying dividends!" > "hmmmm I never considered this paradigm before" > "new guy joins team" > "argh this code is crap"

Object oriented programming can be really elegant... but I can see why people hate on it.

hackinthebochs• 14 years ago

I think you summed it up well. People hate object oriented code because it has an extra startup burden. It's hard to just dive in and start fiddling with code because there are many project-specific abstractions you need to understand before-hand. The new guy on the project has to spend extra time to "grok" the idioms of the project. I personally don't see this as a bad thing.

The fact is, abstraction is key to programming. People who have a hard time managing extra abstractions in their head probably aren't nearly as good of a programmer as they think.

tetha2• 14 years ago

On the other hand, people complaining about this don't realize it is very much the same in any other language.

Go ahead and just fiddle around in that million loc c codebase. Or that million loc java codebase. (and ignore for a second that that c codebase is a large compiler and that java codebase is an elaborate hello world). Or a hypothetical million line haskell codebase.

In C you have to understand modules, functions working on structures and functions controlling the architecture. In Java you have to understand class hierachies and classes or functions managing the control flow. In haskell, you have to understand abstract data types, type classes and monads and functions managing control flow.

richieb• 14 years ago

Java is a new language? It's been around for 15 years or so. OO is even older - goes back to Simula 67 and Smalltalk in late 70s....

seanmcdirmid4• 14 years ago

OO gets a bad rap, it is incredibly useful in applying ontology to program structuring. Yes, OOP in Java isn't ideal, but if you look at more pure OOP languages like Smalltalk or Self, its virtues really do begin to shine through.

FP is great when expressing computations, but we often are just gluing nominal entities together, where OOP excels over FP. I like to have a few FP options in my languages (C#, LINQ), but my mind is firmly rooted in objects when it comes to overall macro design of the program.

ajuc5• 14 years ago

OO is great for systems, where you have real objects, and only care about their current state. In effect - for simulations, games, such stuff.

In most systems - changes over time, archival data, and relations between objects are important. And with OO it's ugly to keep them. You end up implementing relational db backed by object collections. And your nice objects instead of representing nouns (Employee, etc.), start representing relations (Employement, etc.).

So people use relational db with ORMs and load everything from database into objects only to show window/edit data, call one or 2 methods on these objects, and save data back into database. All this ceremony to write employee.giveRaise(raise) instead of giveRaise(employee, raise).

seanmcdirmid4• 14 years ago

And yet this problem kind of goes away in a key value or graph database. I wonder if the ORM mismatch is often not one of objects getting in the way, but one of using relational in the first place. At anyrate, how you manage your objects (for things like search) is ideally orthogonal to the objects themselves; though this is difficult to accomplish in practice.

I use objects in reactive (non-persistent/DB) systems all the time. Objects aren't the problem, but you do have to manage your dependencies dynamically by tracing/dirtying/and cleaning. Objects actually excel at encapsulating and managing state, it is much harder to do this with functions (see all the work on functional-reactive programming).

stitchy• 14 years ago

I'm interested in what alternatives that the author has for the Object Oriented "zealots." I'm assuming that his alternative is a functional language. Personally, I think that functional languages are great, but I don't think that's any reason to flame Java/C++/C#. These are great tools. They were created for specific reasons, and they can certainly be used in efficient ways. Of course, they can also be horribly abused. I don't think that it's fair to say that any particular language is the end-all be-all for development. You have to pick the right tool for the job.

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

So, when Alan Kay implies Java damages the brain, he is quoted. When I say it, I get downvoted. Do I see a double standard here?

BTW, I learned to program on a Texas (TI-55) calculator. What symptoms should I be presenting? ;-)

minikomi• 14 years ago

RSI, perhaps?

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

Any age-related condition would be a fair guess ;-)

eli_gottlieb4• 14 years ago

Objects are a poor man's closure. Closures are a poor man's object. Objects are a poor man's first-class module, and so are closures. First-class modules are a poor man's type-class. Type-classes are a poor man's first-class module.

Hail, Torat Exists, the holy teachings of the existential type!

OO is not Computing, Newer is not More modern

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