Re:Goodbye, Object Oriented Programming (2016)
by _bxg1 on Friday April 27, 2018 @04:52PM
(#16944207)
This is overly simplistic and ranty. Sure, the OOP community got high on its own supply for a decade or two and is now getting some well-deserved criticism, but that doesn't make OOP the devil and it certainly doesn't make all of its claimed virtues null and void (no pun intended).
The "Banana Monkey Jungle" problem applies to any paradigm that involves defining things in terms of other things, including functions that call other functions. You avoid it by writing code that's well-decoupled, no matter what paradigm you're using.
The diamond problem is well-documented and has been solved or worked around by numerous variations on inheritance (referring to methods by their class explicitly, composition, etc.). It's a real problem with Java's "pure" inheritance, but the author doesn't really add anything new to that discussion.
The fragile base class problem is mostly a problem of poor interface definition (read: documentation). Assumptions were made because there was ambiguity, and then those assumptions went from true to not true.
"Object Oriented languages don’t make Contain and Delegate easy to do. They were designed to make Inheritance easy."
It's clear this author has spent most of his time in Java. It's true that vanilla Java makes it difficult/annoying to implement delegation, but C# can do it just fine, as can TypeScript and (I believe) C++.
The Hierarchy Problem, once again, is solved by composition.
The author naively suggests that encapsulation is bad, but what he really means is that hiding values behind their functions is bad (debatable, but not crazy). Encapsulation is an essential building block of writing any nontrivial amount of code. Functions themselves are encapsulation. Libraries are encapsulation.
Finally, in the Polymorphism section, he actually bothers to distinguish the principle from how it's been traditionally applied inside OOP, unlike throughout the rest of the article.
OOP is flawed. OOP as passed down by the Java priests from On High circa 1995 was extremely flawed. But I'm weary of reading people's rants about it, especially when they can't distinguish ideas like encapsulation and polymorphism from OOP, and can't distinguish OOP from Java 1.0. Essays like this throw the baby out with the bathwater. These days some of OOP's critics are just as zealous as its proponents were in the 00s.
The "Banana Monkey Jungle" problem applies to any paradigm that involves defining things in terms of other things, including functions that call other functions. You avoid it by writing code that's well-decoupled, no matter what paradigm you're using.
The diamond problem is well-documented and has been solved or worked around by numerous variations on inheritance (referring to methods by their class explicitly, composition, etc.). It's a real problem with Java's "pure" inheritance, but the author doesn't really add anything new to that discussion.
The fragile base class problem is mostly a problem of poor interface definition (read: documentation). Assumptions were made because there was ambiguity, and then those assumptions went from true to not true.
"Object Oriented languages don’t make Contain and Delegate easy to do. They were designed to make Inheritance easy." It's clear this author has spent most of his time in Java. It's true that vanilla Java makes it difficult/annoying to implement delegation, but C# can do it just fine, as can TypeScript and (I believe) C++.
The Hierarchy Problem, once again, is solved by composition.
The author naively suggests that encapsulation is bad, but what he really means is that hiding values behind their functions is bad (debatable, but not crazy). Encapsulation is an essential building block of writing any nontrivial amount of code. Functions themselves are encapsulation. Libraries are encapsulation.
Finally, in the Polymorphism section, he actually bothers to distinguish the principle from how it's been traditionally applied inside OOP, unlike throughout the rest of the article.
OOP is flawed. OOP as passed down by the Java priests from On High circa 1995 was extremely flawed. But I'm weary of reading people's rants about it, especially when they can't distinguish ideas like encapsulation and polymorphism from OOP, and can't distinguish OOP from Java 1.0. Essays like this throw the baby out with the bathwater. These days some of OOP's critics are just as zealous as its proponents were in the 00s.