Re:Alan Kay on the misunderstanding of OOP (1998)
by optforfon on Friday June 24, 2016 @10:06AM
(#11969823)
Sorry, I mean "drawbacks".
One of the reoccurring complaints about OO is that it leads to huge codebases. Lots of articles about how X rewrote some Java program in Y and it's not 10x smaller and 100x more maintainable. This is a consequence of languages being designed to be minimal in terms of keywords - trying to push off as much as possible on to library writers. Unfortunately this seems to have serious limitations and all the boilerplate can't seem to be hidden in library wrappers
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Alan Kay on the misunderstanding of OOP (1998)
by kmiroslav on Friday June 24, 2016 @12:18PM
(#11970993)
"Huge code base" is a pretty vague metric. Huge in what, lines of code? Binary size?
I'd argue that neither of these are really a good measure, I'm more interested in the concepts that a source file captures than its size in kb, because these concepts correlate directly to how easy it will be to evolve that code base in the future. There is a point of diminishing return in trying to make the code too compact, which basically means you're optimizing in one dimension at the detriments of all the others.