On the subject of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), there are capital-E Experts, most of academia and the mainstream institutions, and there are small-e experts, which include people with amazing credentials and accomplishments. They give remarkably contrasting views on the subject of OOP. Follow the links for an overview, analysis and humor on the subject.
The Exalted Experts on OOP
Here is the start of the description of Brown's intro course to Computer Science, making it clear that "object-oriented design and programming" is the foundational programming method, and Java the best representation language:
Here's their description of OOP, making it clear that there are other ways to program, specifically the nearly-useless functional style, never used in serious production systems.
See below to see what Dr. Alan Kay has to say about Java.
Here is what the major recruiting agency Robert Half has to say on the subject:
Object-oriented programming is such a fundamental part of software development that it’s hard to remember a time when people used any other approach. However, when objected-oriented programming, or OOP, first appeared in the 1980s, it was a radical leap forward from the traditional top-down method.
These days, most major software development is performed using OOP. Thanks to the widespread use of languages like Java and C++, you can’t develop software for mobile unless you understand the object-oriented approach. The same goes for web development, given the popularity of OOP languages like Python, PHP and Ruby.
It's clear: OOP IS modern programming. Except maybe some people who like functional languages.
The mere experts on OOP
We get some wonderful little-e expert witness from here.
“Implementation inheritance causes the same intertwining and brittleness that have been observed when goto statements are overused. As a result, OO systems often suffer from complexity and lack of reuse.” – John Ousterhout Scripting, IEEE Computer, March 1998
“Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.” – John Carmack
OO is the “structured programming” snake oil of the 90' Useful at times, but hardly the “end all” programing paradigm some like to make out of it.
And, at least in it’s most popular forms, it’s can be extremely harmful and dramatically increase complexity.
Inheritance is more trouble than it’s worth. Under the doubtful disguise of the holy “code reuse” an insane amount of gratuitous complexity is added to our environment, which makes necessary industrial quantities of syntactical sugar to make the ensuing mess minimally manageable.
More little-e expert commentary from here.
Alan Kay (1997)
The Computer Revolution hasn’t happened yet
“I invented the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.” and “Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS.” (proof)
Paul Graham (2003)
The Hundred-Year Language
“Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code.”
Richard Mansfield (2005)
Has OOP Failed?
“With OOP-inflected programming languages, computer software becomes more verbose, less readable, less descriptive, and harder to modify and maintain.”
Eric Raymond (2005)
The Art of UNIX Programming
“The OO design concept initially proved valuable in the design of graphics systems, graphical user interfaces, and certain kinds of simulation. To the surprise and gradual disillusionment of many, it has proven difficult to demonstrate significant benefits of OO outside those areas.”
Jeff Atwood (2007)
Your Code: OOP or POO?
“OO seems to bring at least as many problems to the table as it solves.”
Linus Torvalds (2007)
this email
“C++ is a horrible language. … C++ leads to really, really bad design choices. … In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are basically available in C. And limiting your project to C means that people don’t screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that do actually understand low-level issues and don’t screw things up with any idiotic “object model” crap.”
Oscar Nierstrasz (2010)
Ten Things I Hate About Object-Oriented Programming
“OOP is about taming complexity through modeling, but we have not mastered this yet, possibly because we have difficulty distinguishing real and accidental complexity.”
Rich Hickey (2010)
SE Radio, Episode 158
“I think that large objected-oriented programs struggle with increasing complexity as you build this large object graph of mutable objects. You know, trying to understand and keep in your mind what will happen when you call a method and what will the side effects be.”
Eric Allman (2011)
Programming Isn’t Fun Any More
“I used to be enamored of object-oriented programming. I’m now finding myself leaning toward believing that it is a plot designed to destroy joy. The methodology looks clean and elegant at first, but when you actually get into real programs they rapidly turn into horrid messes.”
Joe Armstrong (2011)
Why OO Sucks
“Objects bind functions and data structures together in indivisible units. I think this is a fundamental error since functions and data structures belong in totally different worlds.”
Rob Pike (2012)
here
“Object-oriented programming, whose essence is nothing more than programming using data with associated behaviors, is a powerful idea. It truly is. But it’s not always the best idea. … Sometimes data is just data and functions are just functions.”
John Barker (2013)
All evidence points to OOP being bullshit
“What OOP introduces are abstractions that attempt to improve code sharing and security. In many ways, it is still essentially procedural code.”
Lawrence Krubner (2014)
Object Oriented Programming is an expensive disaster which must end
“We now know that OOP is an experiment that failed. It is time to move on. It is time that we, as a community, admit that this idea has failed us, and we must give up on it.”
Asaf Shelly (2015)
Flaws of Object Oriented Modeling
“Reading an object oriented code you can’t see the big picture and it is often impossible to review all the small functions that call the one function that you modified.”
Here is Wiki's take on issues with OOP. It goes into detail.
Here is Linus Torvald's take on object-oriented C++. Linus is merely the creator and leader of the open-source software that fuels the vast majority of the web.
More details:
Essay by Joe Armstrong. "After its introduction OOP became very popular (I will explain why later) and criticising OOP was rather like “swearing in church”. OOness became something that every respectable language just had to have."
A talk given at an OOP conference by an OOP supporter who lists 10 things he hates.
A Stanford guy telling his evolution to OOP and then out of it. Lots of detail.
A professional who gradually realized there were issues with objects.
I have therefore been moving away from the object-oriented development principles that have made up the bulk of my 17 year career to date. More and more I am beginning to feel that objects have been a diversion away from building concise, well structured and reusable software.
As I pondered on this topic, I realised that this isn’t a sudden switch in my thinking. The benefits of objects have been gradually declining over a long period of time.
A detailed explanation of how the noun-centricity of OO languages perverts everything. Here is an extended quote from the start of this brilliant essay:
All Java people love "use cases", so let's begin with a use case: namely, taking out the garbage. As in, "Johnny, take out that garbage! It's overflowing!"
If you're a normal, everyday, garden-variety, English-speaking person, and you're asked to describe the act of taking out the garbage, you probably think about it roughly along these lines:get the garbage bag from under the sink
carry it out to the garage
dump it in the garbage can
walk back inside
wash your hands
plop back down on the couch
resume playing your video game (or whatever you were doing)
Even if you don't think in English, you still probably still thought of a similar set of actions, except in your favorite language. Regardless of the language you chose, or the exact steps you took, taking out the garbage is a series of actions that terminates in the garbage being outside, and you being back inside, because of the actions you took.
Our thoughts are filled with brave, fierce, passionate actions: we live, we breathe, we walk, we talk, we laugh, we cry, we hope, we fear, we eat, we drink, we stop, we go, we take out the garbage. Above all else, we are free to do and to act. If we were all just rocks sitting in the sun, life might still be OK, but we wouldn't be free. Our freedom comes precisely from our ability to do things.
Of course our thoughts are also filled with nouns. We eat nouns, and buy nouns from the store, and we sit on nouns, and sleep on them. Nouns can fall on your head, creating a big noun on your noun. Nouns are things, and where would we be without things? But they're just things, that's all: the means to an end, or the ends themselves, or precious possessions, or names for the objects we observe around around us. There's a building. Here's a rock. Any child can point out the nouns. It's the changes happening to those nouns that make them interesting.
Change requires action. Action is what gives life its spice. Action even gives spices their spice! After all, they're not spicy until you eat them. Nouns may be everywhere, but life's constant change, and constant interest, is all in the verbs.
And of course in addition to verbs and nouns, we also have our adjectives, our prepositions, our pronouns, our articles, the inevitable conjunctions, the yummy expletives, and all the other lovely parts of speech that let us think and say interesting things. I think we can all agree that the parts of speech each play a role, and all of them are important. It would be a shame to lose any of them.
Wouldn't it be strange if we suddenly decided that we could no longer use verbs?
Let me tell you a story about a place that did exactly that...
The Kingdom of Nouns
In the Kingdom of Javaland, where King Java rules with a silicon fist, people aren't allowed to think the way you and I do. In Javaland, you see, nouns are very important, by order of the King himself. Nouns are the most important citizens in the Kingdom. They parade around looking distinguished in their showy finery, which is provided by the Adjectives, who are quite relieved at their lot in life. The Adjectives are nowhere near as high-class as the Nouns, but they consider themselves quite lucky that they weren't born Verbs.
Conclusion
No big surprise, the experts beat the Experts hands-down. But you'd never know if you go through typical Computer Science "education," absorb the way that object-orientation is the "dominant" paradigm of computing and read the job requirements that talk about how the hiring group is serious about their object-hood. Programmers who are serious about what they do and try to understand it soon see the lack of clothing on King Object and move on.
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