There's nothing wrong with object methods (that's 100% pure syntax vs. a function call) and an implicit "this" scope for symbols (which is just a limited form of dynamic scope[1]). They don't make code hard to understand. OO can be abused to produce bad designs, of course, but that's not an indictment of its syntax.

Non-syntactic aspects are maybe a more involved discussion. For an example, I personally think traditional OO lends itself very nicely to runtime polymorphism. And this is something that more modern languages have really struggled with (take a random new hacker and try to explain to them virtual functions vs. trait objects). Now... polymorphism can be horribly abused. But, it's still useful, and IMHO the current trends are throwing it out with the bathwater.

[1] Something that itself has long since fallen out of fashion but which has real uses. Being able to reference the "current" value of a symbol (in the sense of "the current thing we are working on") is very useful.

.. “Our customers wanted OO prolog so we made OO prolog” .. http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/OO_programming/why_oo_suck...

.. screw things up with any idiotic "object model" crap. .. http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus

On the flip side, the modern language zeitgeist isn't really trying to change things in fundamental ways, except to say "don't do bad OO". But you don't need to reject OO syntax and features (c.f. polymorphism above) to reject bad OO. That part is fashion.

But to me the rise of OOP in the 90es where driven by the need of programming user interfaces and the rise of Windows and similar. A graphical user interface is naturally represented as a hierarchy of objects each with their own internal state. Often the language was designed to work in an integrated development environment with a user interface builder (with language features such as object serialization and reflection).

This is very obvious in Borland Delphi (OO Pascal), Objective-C, VB, Smalltalk, C#.

Then things shifted and people started doing web development where all of sudden you had hundreds of concurrent users on a single server; and then people began (re)inventing languages that handled concurrency well.

Having said that. I don't think the dominating trend today is functional programming but rather "multiparadigm" (as it should be).

I disagree, I'd say all of the quoted languages are attempting to fundamentally change things to get around the expression problem[0][1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11683379

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expression_problem

OO crapola also mapped reasonably well onto GUI design. That's a whole class of programming that doesn't really exist any more. Where it does (I dunno what people use besides Qt), it looks kind of objecty.

1980 module, Modula-2

1979? package, Ada

http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/history-and-goals-of-modu...

Clean compositions, ala Scala traits, can be done with OO. It's just not something I've seen in the wild, or something actively encouraged by any OO teachings I've witnessed. At the same time, composition is pretty much the only way FP is taught (at least in my experience).

UI heavily relies on a large number of conventions that the user learns to expect to cat in certain ways. You can parameterize a UI widget that encapsulates these conventions with function pointers or overridden methods, but the end result is pretty much the same.

I'll strongly agree however that far too few programmers in OO languages pay enough attention to the hard problem of designing for extension. It's the reason that C#, unlike Java, defaults to non-virtual methods.

In PHP for example all query builders are meant to be used as a tree of objects, which means if you want to recursively change the table names used by the query you're out of luck because that state is often private and behaviour not implemented

Or maybe you want to inspect the query as data at runtime or assert against its shape or deeply update or delete or copy or compose parts of it all of those things are difficult

But use a data oriented library and suddenly they're easy transparent and predictable, self plug : https://github.com/slifin/beeline-php

See hiccup for a data oriented UI HTML tree, honeySQL for SQL there's one for css, routing, there's some for all of the state of your app like redux and Integrant

As soon as you have a tree of objects your coworkers won't know how your objects work till you train them and even then it won't be as powerful as your standard library, but your coworkers do know how to manipulate arrays vectors maps sets dictionaries etc self made objects are obtuse in these use cases

Objects are a bit weaker for UI as a projection of a domain data model, especially when it needs to be reactive to changes in the underlying data. The more the UI is data-bound, the more I prefer a functional / data flow idiom.

Classical OOP forces you to organize around a single and very specific taxonomy; things "in real life" are usually the very opposite of that. I remember textbook examples of inheritance with shapes or animals, both of which actually show clearly why it's a bad idea.

Man, I wonder how people went through this wondering, Who uses this? Can't they show us something real!

Eventually you just kind of tune out, because when you often meet the real world use cases, OO either descends to hierarchical verbosity from hell with layers and layers of generic abstract stuff when things should be more direct.

Nonetheless, that was in 2013, it's now 2019, video games are still written in C++ and not any FP language. FP has been "the future" for as long as I've been alive and I don't think it'll ever happen.

Of course you can separate concerns properly in an OO context, but most developers don't. It's much easier to consider properly when the entire language is structured around it.

Back when Gmail just started, one of the things that it made different from other web-mail services (including hotmail) was letting you "label" emails instead of "moving them" to folders.

The problem with Directories was that, at some point, content might have two different classifications, so the question of putting it in two directories arises (if using that abstraction).

Same thing happens with Object hierarchies, even if you start meticulously defining the hierarchy of your objects given the current domain you are mapping, chances are in 2 years you will get a trait/data that does not really fall in one of your defined objects, and you will struggle to put it in one or the other, and your encapsulation will start breaking.

That happens "in practice" in real life, and is something that tons of books about OOD, OOA, and OOP define as incorrect architecture in theory, but there was always a disconnect.

I don't code Scala, but aren't these traits approximately same as interfaces in C#? Interfaces are used a lot in the wild, including in the standard library, they're often generic, IEnumerable<T>, IComparable<T>, and so on.

It is.

The strength of a language isn't just in what allows you to do, but also in what it limits you to do.

OO in the style of C++/C#/Java is extremely flexible in terms of code organization. This means that most codebases eventually grow towards a mess of different styles and inconsistent design patterns. One guy's abstraction is the next guy's unnecessary plumbing. Teams often have to manage consistency of style and structure through out-of-code agreements.

The advantage of paradigms like procedural or functional programming as well as trait based "OO", is that there is generally an obvious way to structure something. Two different programmers working on the same problem, are likely to produce similarly structured code. The result is that different programmers will adopt much easier to different codebases.

Is the problem perhaps that the wrong lessons were taken from earlier OOPs by later OOPs? Alan Kay in 2003:

> OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.

* http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19415983 (via)

Funnily enough it also describes some of my more elaborate shell scripts with various messages flowing into and out of self contained processes.

And surely that would be the way that you consider correct.

After seeing codebases with hundreds of global variables I know that OOP is not the only paradigm that can be abused.

My problem with OO is one of culture. If and only if you work with big codebases you start to feel that you can’t make assumptions about anything. For all I know the plus operator can send nukes. Then they say it doesn’t matter because they made the perfect lasagna with a million layers.

I know there’s a million ways to code with oo to make it better. But I never saw that enforced by tools which is a must if we are a thousand developers in the same company.

Meanwhile if I see a concept in Haskell I can in most cases just trust the assumptions.

Also the compiler researchers that I adore are those that focus on making proofs and stable code, not the ones trying to dumb down programming to make it accessible.

You build a house, which is more important, a good foundation (built on math) or accessibility for the beginner builders?

If you feel you can just 'trust the assumptions' in Haskell but not in OO environments you've probably just been comparing very different codebases written by very different programmers.

In a codebase that uses OOP well it's very easy to understand what assumptions you can make and the tooling can be excellent. For instance, IntelliJ will happily show you all the possible implementations of a virtual method if you're using polymorphism. "It might launch the nukes" is pure Haskell meme noise - the equivalent unexpected behaviour for Haskell would be a difficult to understand space leak.

I’ve used Agda. It’s extremely difficult. Even pretty basic proofs can be extremely tricky; just figuring out how to use the transitive equality proof syntax is a challenge. You quickly run into the need for stuff like “universe polymorphism” which comes with a huge and terrifying theory. If this is the only way to make decent programs then we’re doomed!

grandparent comment is saying that OO codebases express conways law more fully (as it is definitely a spectrum).

I don't have an opinion on it either way (beyond stating that adherance to conways law is a spectrum rather than binary), just clarifying.

Although you make some good points, I disagree with the premise that it’s pure fashion. Language syntax doesn’t prevent you from implementing various OO paradigms but when you combine syntax with community norms, things do tend to be constrained. Nobody does traditional inheritance in Go, for example, which actually tends to work out well in use cases where it’s popular.

I do believe that object orientation as a concept has value. A lot of concepts map easily to objects by nature. However the 90s OOP fashion, exemplified by Java, lead to horrible lasagna code. Especially if the underlying space didn't map straightforwardly to the concept of an object, then you're adding a layer of abstraction that can lead to misunderstandings.

OOP is inherently an imperative paradigm; you might mean “procedural” instead of “imperative” (certainly, that makes both uses of “imperative” in your post more sensible), but even then, OOP as a paradigm is very closely related to the procedural paradigm.

I agree it's fashion to some extent, and still could be done with OOP, though I think it's nice we are doing it this way (for the above reasons).

pun intended?

Not really; in OOP a method call like `foo.bar(baz)` sends the `foo` object the message `bar` with argument `baz` (in Kay's current terminology); or, in more 'mainstream' terminology, it looks for a method in the `bar` slot of `foo` and calls it with `baz`.

As far as I'm aware, this is a pretty core concept in OOP: if our code isn't organised along these lines, then we're writing non-OOP code which just-so-happens to use classes/prototypes/methods (in the same way that we can e.g. write OOP code in C which just-so-happens to use procedures/switch/etc.).

(Side caveat: I appreciate that I'm making some assumptions here; one of my pet peeves with OOP is that it's rife with No True Scotsman fallacies about what is "proper" OOP, e.g. see 90% of the content on https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com )

There is a fundamental asymmetry between the roles of `foo` (object, receiver of message, container of methods) and `baz` (argument, included in message, passed into method).

A function call like `bar(foo, baz)` doesn't have this asymmetry: the order of the arguments is just a convenience, it has no effect on how the `bar` symbol is resolved (in most languages it's via lexical scope, just like every other variable). Swapping them is also trivial, e.g.:

    var flip = function(f) { return function(x, y) { return f(y, x); }; };
    var rab  = flip(bar);

    bar(foo, baz) == rab(baz, foo)

Of course, the elephant in the room here is CLOS, but that's sufficiently different from most OOP as-practiced that it's better considered separately (e.g. I'd be more inclined to agree that CLOS methods are "100% pure syntax vs a function call")

> Non-syntactic aspects are maybe a more involved discussion. For an example, I personally think traditional OO lends itself very nicely to runtime polymorphism.

I also disagree with this, again due to the artificial asymmetries that OOP introduces (that objects "contain" methods). In particular, as far as I'm aware OOP simply cannot express return-type polymorphism. The asymmetry between arguments and return values is certainly more fundamental than the completely unneeded distinction between receiver and arguments, but it's still very useful to dispatch on the output rather than the input.

The classic example is `toString` being trivial in OOP (a method which takes some object as input and renders it to a string; the implementation dispatches on the given object); whilst `fromString` is hard (a method which takes a string and returns some object parsed from it; OOP can't dispatch the implementation by "looking inside" the object, since we don't have an object until we've finished parsing).

    inline fun <reified T> String.fromString(): T {
        return when {
            T::class == String::class -> this
            T::class == Int::class -> Integer.valueOf(this)
            else -> TODO()
        } as T
    }

    val str: String = "abc".decode()
    val int: Int = "123".decode()

You might say this isn't OOP in the strictest possible sense, but extension methods + type inference + reified types gives what you're asking for in a way that's natural for an OOP programmer.

I'd say that's a feature, not a bug :)

> You might say this isn't OOP in the strictest possible sense

I would say it's not OOP in any sense. Having one function implement all the different behaviours, and pick which one to run by switching on some data (in this case the class tag) is a classic example of being not OOP.

As a bonus, this ignores dynamic dispatch (the only implementation is for `String`) and it's not polymorphic (the same code doesn't work for different types; instead we have different clauses for each type).

This would be salvagable if `String::fromString` only enforced the type constraint, and dispatched to `T::fromString` to do the actual parsing, e.g.

    inline fun <reified T> String.fromString(): T {
        return when {
            T::class == String::class -> this
            else                      -> T::fromString(this)
        } as T
    }

I also wouldn't use this pattern but, it is possible, and Kotlin is an OOP language.

OOP encourages adding layers of abstraction, indirection, and generic stuff that sounds great if you're trying to create some kind of generic underlying framework for everything. But it makes a huge mess when you're just trying to solve a specific problem, fix a bug, or make one tiny change. Now you have to debug trace through 65 layers of unrelated generic abstract stuff to try to figure out where/why something's going wrong.

I suspect one of the reasons that some new languages don't give you that gun to shoot yourself in the foot with is because the people that made them had worked on large OOP codebases and suffered from similar problems. They're making languages to more simply solve problems in a straightforward and direct manner.

Of course, you could do that with OOP. But people don't. Given OOP, (and that book of patterns that they found), they get fancy and make it way more over-complicated than it needs to be. The result is, ironically, unmaintainable software that takes way longer to work on, and has unexpected bugs throughout the system causing bugs in distant unrelated places - exactly the sorts of problems that OOP was supposed to address. I don't think that's an inherent problem of OOP, but just our human nature. We can screw up anything.

So new systems with more constraints can help reduce the ways that we can screw things up. And if you really need to get stuff done, the more constraints you can place on it, the better. Static typing, non-OOP programming, limited-palette artwork - it all comes down to less ways for you to screw it up, and easier to fix if you do.

Generics/templates and indirection are not OOP. Procedural style encourages them as well. You can see that in C++ itself.

This is like describing a middle aged man based on what he did in middle school. Things evolve. C++ has. Almost to a fault where one can legitimately call it a mutation.

I always remark that programming practices change when programmers retire, not when features get added. Most people learn these things through existing code bases, and these habits last ages into the future.

This is why most of the times, you just start using a totally new language, that way you buy into a totally new set of programmers, practices and community.

The good ones do.

> This is why most of the times, you just start using a totally new language, that way you buy into a totally new set of programmers, practices and community.

What happens when that new language reaches a stage where it needs new features?

I think new languages are unnecessary unless they comprehensively solve the problems of the existing ones, and don't create new ones of their own. I have always felt that creating brand new languages is more of a personal taste driven rebellion against the language one uses. When they find that its too cumbersome for their taste, or the clique in committee refuses reforms etc, those who can will go ahead and create, some evangelize successfully (I feel this is the case because I have created a few half baked languages over the years to challenge C++ lol).

Now, there is a very similar problem with concepts like recursion. Even Algorithm, DS and problem solving in general. You never get to learn this stuff well because you get drowned in syntax juggling, type headaches, absence of good features to do recursion, first class functions, mutability, closures, pattern matching, and data handling etc well.

I find learning these things in ML or Lisp languages simplifies the problem to a great extent. You basically learn to how to solve problems and then how to use the right tools to solve the problems. Instead people chose tools that send them solving infinite sub problems to arrive at solving the real problem. Most people tune out, and rightly so. Efficiency comes after correctness in any approach. And you should never optimize for speed to begin with.

Most people getting introduced to programming in Java/C++ are generally digging through layers and layers of code trying to do what should be done simply in a straight forward way. This is often made more complicated by addition of frameworks and opinionated way of forcing people doing things in a way that requires them to go and read and work through an entire history of software literature. All the while you could just write code to solve the problem.

Design Pattern abuse is very common in OO world. And people for some reason like to write a lot of code sometimes for something as simple as writing a few lines of code.

As for Lisp and ML, being Indian, I had no access to these, even in CS section of the library, as you might understand. Many years ago I tried learning Scheme by/after watching the lecture series. I even have the book SICP. It is fun and elegant, refreshingly so, no doubt, but only till a point. I found once we venture into necessity for conditionals & data mutation, its unbearably cumbersome - I can deal with spaghetti C code but not this - may be I am conditioned by exclusive C++ usage. I tend to think those who stick to Scheme like languages and solve real world problems do it for bravado and cry when no one is looking lol.

As for design pattern, I don't see it being exclusive to OO. Its just a bunch of ideas to build software. One would have it for assembler as well if it was used for mass production (I wonder how it was in early days when it was exclusively assembler). Its certainly poorly used and abused, agreed.

I understand being in the same situation myself.

>>I tend to think those who stick to Scheme like languages and solve real world problems do it for bravado and cry when no one is looking lol.

That's mostly because of lack of libraries and the amount of reading one has to do to learn totally new way(ironically the original way) of doing things. Data structures are linked lists(lists), stacks(lists with utility functions), queues(lists with utility functions), trees(list of lists), heaps(list of lists), graph(interconnected lists). Basically dealing with data structures is List processing, hence the name Lisp. Now since building lists using Lisp with recursion gets easier because of amazing native facilities that come with Lisp. These things just get a whole lot easier. A lot of people will tell you they see that moment of enlightenment when they learn recursion in Lisp. It just feels like the concept was always there and you discovered it neatly while work through it.

SML and its descendants are the same, additionally you get the same enlightenment with Type systems.

When you read through Lisp, and then work with DS/Algo you begin to feel, the entirety of DS/Algo work was invented, grown and perfected in a totally different set of tools and thinking philosophies and then artificially shoe horned into C languages.

In the modern context Clojure and F# come across as nice replacements. Tons of libraries and good documentation/books are available for help.

OTOH a lot of great work is done in modern incarnations of Lisp and ML. Including mission critical large software stuff. This is because of strong typing in languages like F#, and code compression using macros in Lisp. Clojure is also designed to solve a lot of big problems that effect software development at large.

One of the things I realized while working with Python after using SML. When using Python I was running a kind of buggy type inference engine in my brain, then write unit tests cases to validate it. No human should do things that can automated with a computer. That includes programming itself.

Someday people will look at type systems, macros and recursion the same way as we look at garbage collection. If a computer can do it, and it can do it better than you. It is criminal to spend human effort doing it.

This is really the digging with shovels equivalent of writing code. Let the compiler work for you.

One could in fact think of monads as a design pattern for FP.

Just use Java, or C#, or any of the dozen other mature, widely used languages that support it.

Do you know what is monad?

Layers of abstraction are mostly based on polymorphism, Rust and Go support polymorphism. Though layers of abstraction are mandatory in modern coding practices in all languages if you don't write code as a single function with gotos and global variables.

- It doesn’t do great as the code gets older or more complex. Google “fragile base class problem”.

- Inheritance doesn’t do a good job of modeling most real-world problems. Most situations don’t map into a simple “class Dog extends Animal” kind of hierarchy. Steve Yegge’s “the kingdom of nouns” is a great rant on this topic.

- OOP actually requires expert-level knowledge to do right. It seems like it’s beginner-friendly but that’s kind of deceptive. If you’re using inheritance then you should understand Liskov substitution, otherwise it’s not going to work well. And if there’s generics involved then you might need to understand covariance vs contravariance, which is also a beginner-hostile expectation.

Imo, out of the newer languages, I really like Golang’s take. Interface-heavy, no inheritance, and some nice sugar around composition. Dunno if I agree with their lack of generics but I understand the choice, generics create a lot of complexity.

Can't think of any sensible 3+ classes deep hierarchy that I've seen in a sensible project. I've seen some that are not sensible.

Inheritance gets ragged on a lot these days, but frankly I see it all the time in most mature, production codebases and it's usually used properly and in a tasteful manner. IMO the idea that inheritance is evil is just people who want to make a new programming language looking for a philosophical edge - just like how a bunch of language designers decided exceptions suck because "you can't see the control flow" (eg. in Go) and now years later have basically admitted their error handling sucks, so they need to add something very exception-like back in. Actually exceptions never sucked but Go's designers needed some sort of fresh idea to justify their project.

Was that the paradigm or the language implementation of the paradigm? The big two languages in the '90s were Java and C++ (later C#?).

If everyone was writings in Lisp/Smalltalk (or even Tcl), would things have turned out differently?

I'm with you in that I never really found the OOP style to mesh well with my brain. I always felt like I had to fight it and dealing with massive chains of class inheritance can make it really hard to reason about and change code. I've spent years building web apps with Python and Ruby too.

Having only spent a short while with Elixir, I'm finding semi-complicated topics and patterns to be a lot easier to digest even with no formal functional programming background.

Like just today I watched a talk where a guy live coded a web framework DSL in about 30 minutes[0]. One with a beautiful API for controllers and a router. It was a total head explode moment for me (but not in a bad way, it was like seeing the light).

I'm still a newbie with functional programming but so far it feels much more like a WYSIWYG style of programming where your domain is front and center where with OOP it feels like you're bombarded with purposely confusing legal documents and fine print with a small bit of your domain thrown into the mix.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRXc-jKRESA

But in its traditional Gang of Four incarnation (which I encountered years later as a newbie), it felt like an awful lot of ceremony and unneeded complexity to get anything done.

I've known most of these folks since the '80s and something that we've discussed a few times is wondering if it's when we got serious about computers, what platform (e.g. C64 or Apple II), or continuous employment in the field (I have a history of going off to do other things most of my dev friends have always been devs), preferred platform today (mostly WinTel vs. Linux), or the niche we work in (I mostly work in embedded stuff, lots of my friends work with stuff related to pretty big systems, either big back end stuff or user facing I/O).

Anyway I find the recent popularity of alternative styles to a welcome recurring innovation, especially the idea of having a "Functional Core with an Imperative Shell".

It is possible to build these systems using OO, by reifying the network of functions and the data into objects. But all you are really doing is reinventing functional programming with a layer of OO cruft on top of it, and it is always going to be easier to build the equivalent system in a language that lets the functions and the data structures be unencumbered.

For programming tasks that actually are best conceptualised as objects, OO works quite well. These usually involve the provisioning of some largely static virtual environment, such as a UI, game world, or inversion of control container. Here, objects are long-lived, genuinely independent, and interact in well-defined ways via actions and events, usually swapping only small pieces of state.

My guess is that the advent of GUIs and sophisticated games in the 80s and 90s pushed programmers to be more interested in this latter type of problem, and this was reflected in the languages that evolved. Then the advent of the internet and machine learning in the 2000s and 2010s revived interest in data processing and data flow, and so language design began to shift back.

I suspect in 100 years, if humans are still doing any programming, all popular languages will be mixed-paradigm, and the question of OO vs functional will simply be a blend decided by needs of the problem at hand, rather than the kind of dogmatic arguments of this era, which will be viewed through a historical lens as rather quaint and silly.

What makes you think we'll need to wait that long? C#, C++, JavaScript, Java, Swift, Kotlin, Dart, Scala, Python, and Ruby all have objects, methods, polymorphism, first-class functions, lambdas, closures, and higher-order functions.

Actually data oriented design and entity component systems work much better for games. You don't have hidden states and data flows much nicer from system to system. Actually, ECS is a good solution for implementing GUIs, too.

This may sometimes lead to code that is difficult to reason out... but if you have a few objects and many functions, OOP can be less verbose than FP.

I say this as a stronger supporter of FP than OOP.

I could elaborate, but others have said it better anyways.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_over_inheritance

The article you linked mentions IMHO the biggest disadvantage:

One common drawback of using composition instead of inheritance is that methods being provided by individual components may have to be implemented in the derived type, even if they are only forwarding methods

Code whose only purpose is to "appease the design" and otherwise does absolutely nothing of value is a strong-enough negative reason. It's pure bloat, overhead that gets in the way of both programmers trying to understand/debug and machines trying to execute.

Too much inheritance can lead to a "where is the method" problem, but I think that's still better than the alternative of dozens upon dozens of lines of otherwise useless code, because the former at least does not increase the amount of code that needs to be written/debugged/maintained.

   {...students(ajaxDb), ...teachers(ajaxDb)}

   public class StudentsAndTeachers extends Students implements IStudents, ITeachers {
       private _teachers;
       public constructor(Database db, Teachers teachers) {
           super(db);
           _teachers = teachers;
       }
       public getTeacher(TeacherId teacherId) {
           return _teachers.getTeacher(teacherId);
       }
   }

   new StudentsAndTeachers(ajaxDb, new Teachers(ajaxDb));

(More likely, you wouldn't write this, but every example that is colloquial in inheritance is non-colloquial in composition. The composition oriented solution can be used cleanly with strong guarantees provided to its users; whereas all inheritance oriented solutions are so tacky and hard to use that you will demand a framework with dependency injection which half your team won't be able to understand and will have to treat as magical incantations.)

Note: I'm not saying that ridiculous_fish is right. But it's pretty obvious that that's the claim.

I've only fell into composition when I got into video game development. We saw it a bit more with Silverlight but now it's such a clear movement (composition over inheritance) that it's in my resume's motto.

I recall encountering Emerald in the late 1980s. Here's its 1989 paper on composition over inheritance (code reuse wise): http://www.emeraldprogramminglanguage.org/Raj_ComputerJourna...

What you can do is make composition easier. Kotlin does this with its delegation system: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/delegation.html

That said I don’t claim inheritance to be useless by any means, and I would not use Go for every kind of software.

I kinda agree. Still, for an imperative language I think it's a tool I'd like to have in my toolbox, or at least it needs a compelling alternative, which I don't think Go has (1). Of course there are many cases in which you can do perfectly without.

(1) I know it has composition through struct embedding, but not real inheritance: a method delegated to the embedded struct can't call back a method on the embedder automatically. If you do know of some other means in which Go can replace this kind of inheritance, I'd be happy to hear about it.

A big idea of OOP is to allow components to evolve independently. Java ensures that today's code would run on next year's JVMs and class libraries. Your user's upgrade their OS and your app keeps running, and now supports dark mode. Rad, right?

But new languages like Rust/Go/etc have bincompat as a non-goal. A minor version bump means fix the compiler errors, recompile the universe, giant static binary, GtG. This is sweet for server deployments.

Meanwhile client-side has shifted in the other direction: it's harder than ever to launch a new programming language that runs on your user's computers. The major OS vendors now control the programming stack: ObjC/Swift, Java/Kotlin, etc. Supporting an alternative stack like React Native or Flutter requires enterprise-level investment. OS vendor tooling and APIs form an immense moat.

JavaScript is the exception that proves the rule. JS has its twisted take on objects, but supports enough dynamicism for reflection, polyfills, etc to permit backwards and forwards compatibility. This is where OOP shines! (Imagine replacing JS with Rust - it's absurd) But JavaScript is so hard to compete with on its turf - the web - that it sucks all of the oxygen out of the room. (WASM makes the problem worse, not better: there's zero plausible bincompat story for WASM APIs).

OOP is about enabling independent evolution of components: the OS, app, plugins, etc. all in a conversation. The modern computing landscape is about siloed software stacks on a client, and statically-linked megaliths on a server. The strengths of OOP can't be engaged now.

>But new languages like Rust/Go/etc have bincompat as a non-goal

Sorry but this has nothing to do with OOP

However, it looks like ensuring backward compatibility is an enemy now: users are forced do upgrade, sometimes every day, so obviously in the eyes of those corporations backward compatibility can be completely ignored.

There is Elixir / Erlang which many consider to stick more closely to the original idea of OOP.

All that said, I think it's just that OOP was always broader than the most used languages made it seem. Message passing OOP (like smalltalk, ruby and arguably Erlang/Elixir processes) are not exactly the same as the more class structured OOP (Java, C++, Python) and even before many of those languages there was already the Common Lisp Object System which extended single dispatch OOP to multiple dispatch (and like with Julia, is object.func(args) really different from func(object, args) enough to not be OOP?). In the same way interfaces/traits/abstract classes/composition/dataclasses are also present in OOP languages to handle cases where the model is not a perfect hierarchy of self managing entities, so a language favoring those over inheritance in general is just being more opinionated towards a strategy that was already possible in traditional OOP.

* The value of values

* Simple made easy

* Are we there yet?

I'm on mobile, but you'll find these easily on the google.

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hi...

If you're going to watch any of these, at least watch "The Value of Values".

In short OO gets time fundamentally wrong, is unable to represent a discrete succession of values, and entangles state with operation.

OO has been ~35 year wrong turn for the software development industry.

FP has become fashionable in recent years and now it's gone to people's heads. But some difficult facts about computer science remain:

- CPUs are much faster at reading and writing to recently used locations. Mutating in place is fast compared to constantly copying things.

- Many of the most efficient data structures and algorithms require mutable state. There are entire areas of computer science where you cannot implement them efficiently without mutable state, like hash tables.

- Constantly copying immutable objects places enormous load on the GC. This is getting better with time (there are open source ultra-low-pause GCs now), but, Rich Hickey just sort of blows this off with a comment that the "GC will clean up the no longer referenced past". Sure it will: at a price.

- He repeats the whole canard about FP being the only way to exploit parallel programming. People have been claiming this for decades and it's not true. The biggest parallel computations on the planet not so long ago were MapReduce jobs at Google: written in C++. Yes, the over-arching framework was (vaguely) FP inspired. But no actual FP languages appeared anywhere, the content of the maps and reductions were fully imperative and the MapReduce API was itself OO C++!

Also note that Java has a rather advanced parallel streams and fork/join framework for doing data parallel computation. I never once saw it used in many years of reading Java. SIMD is a much more useful technique but nearly all SIMD code is written in C++, or the result of Java auto-vectorisation. FP programming, again, doesn't have any edge here.

They are given by the author of Clojure, but Clojure is hardly a prerequisite to many of his talks.

Many of the newer languages are multi-paradigm trying to find a sweet spot that either takes the best of each and add something new or tries to capture a large audience with features.

There are domains where OOP fits perfectly, there are domains where functional programming fits perfectly, there are even domains where imperative programming fits perfectly.

We're constantly searching for the perfect fits-it-all solution which we haven't found yet. From my POV this is why there are some competing standards, which all have their merits but on a first glance exclude each other.

Back when it seemed most people were doing Java, we expected any new language to be OO. At the time, when a new language design chose not to provide traditional OO... that could be for elegance of the language design, and (by accident or design) also a nudge to programmers, to learn how to use other concepts.

And, with some languages, the language is powerful enough that you can layer a reasonable implementation of a traditional object system atop their primitives, if you want to.

FWIW, Racket (a Scheme descendant) has always had an traditional object system library (ordinary class-instance, plus mixins), which was used for its cross-platform GUI library and IDE application framewok, but is not often used for other things. Racket's somewhat simpler `struct`, however, is used heavily, for all sorts of things, as are the traditional basic Scheme/Lisp types. Scheme/Racket procedures are also used heavily, including to do things that you'd use objects for in some other languages. And Scheme (and especially Racket) also gives you very powerful tools for syntax extension, which, among its uses, can do things elegantly that would be pretty messy or nonviable to do with traditional OOP classes. You can also roll your own object library in Scheme/Racket -- I once quickly whipped up a simple prototype-delegation model as an extension to portable Scheme, as an exercise, and this is within the abilities of any fairly new Scheme programmer.

(I'm not disrespecting OO. I'm a long-time OO person, in several languages, including having been a commercial developer of fancy OO developer tools, and tend to architect (at least) data of systems with OO or entity-relationship. But, programming-wise lately, I've mostly been working mostly with what used to be considered non-OO "paradigms".)

The premise was great. We reason about things as real-world objects, if we organize our code the same way, we can reason about our code.

Twenty-plus years later, In practice, however, I'm given a graphics object with a DisplayText method. It has three parameters, two of which are optional. If I call it with text I want displayed? It is an extremely rare event that what I wanted to happen, happens.

It gets much worse from this simple example, with versioning, monkey-patching, and overloading (ouch!). Add in multiple languages using the same codebase? Mutable code?

The maintenance programmer is left with a general concept. Under that concept there is code. Whether that concept maps to the concept the users asked about, or what changes in state that code makes? Nobody knows.

It's worse than bad. The incoming programmer is given concepts he thinks he can reason about, but which rarely match what's actually happening.

To combat that, the OO-mutable guys have gone to TDD. Test-first, then code.

That's a survival skill in modern programming, but all it does is change the definition of "What is a foo?" from a free-wheeling conversation to a concrete executable set of tests. And that is assuming you use it everywhere.

OO was a big-picture, conceptually-simple way of organizing code for big projects. We had a bucket for everything.

We ended up with hundreds of buckets that were confusing and we were never sure what belonged where, or if we touched one thing what other things might happen.

Functions, however, remained very simple. No matter what the function does, is it something you want or not? As long as you keep it simple and immutable, over time you keep building up and honing a reusable set of functions: tokens describing important things you want the system to do. As it turns out, quite surprisingly to me and others, reasoning and simplifying around what you want the system to do is much more productive and easier to understand than reasoning and simplifying around what you want the system to be

1. Encapsulation

2. Polymorphism

3. Inheritance

4. Abstraction

5. Code re-use

6. Design Benefits

7. Software Maintenance

8. Single responsibility principle

9. Open/closed principle

10. Interface segregation principle

11. Dependency inversion principle

12. Static type checking

He then goes on to debunk them showing alternatives from functional programming.

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/object-oriented-progr...

Take Rust. Just because I like their pragmatic approach. They represent objects as structs with functions attached that have access to the struct data. In C++, Java, etc this is roughly how objects actually work underneath.

They eliminate inheritance, replacing it with interfaces. Exposing the objects for what they really are, structs with functions attached, makes this strategy easier.

Traditional OOP, especially with multiple inheritance, tends to encourage nested objects (structs) that become hard to reason about.

Another related innovation has been structural typing. Typescript is great with this. Essentially, if you have two "objects" with the same fields, you can assign them to eachother freely. Typescript doesn't care if they actually inherit from eachother. If the interface signatures are compatible (matching fields, matching types), they can be freely used in eachothers place. This is great for constructing anonymous objects to pass off without all the cruft, basically just Json fields.

TLDR: newer languages decided that if two objects look like ducks they are both ducks, even if you decide to call one something else. Because who really cares what you name your ducks or which ducks they inherit from. This breaks from traditional OOP by loosening the rules of inheritance, but so far it's been a boon for productivity (for me at least)

I don't see how this is not already achievable in Java or C#. No one is forcing you to use inheritance. And when you really need it, it's there for you to use instead of jumping through hoops.

There are better solutions like what Kotlin and Scala use (and potentially C# in a future version).

Structs with functions attached is easy, and not entirely uncommon in procedural and even functional languages.

Who cares if it's an employee or a gun, as long as I can fire it.

But I will assume you're a better observer than me, and make the following claims:

I think there's two reasons: Object-oriented style inheritance is unsound (inheritance is not subtyping), so academics don't like it. Moreover, classical OO is not composable or extensible - unless you write your own primitives in every application and end up with Java-like verbosity. Therefore, research in new features tend not to be object oriented. Therefore, new languages tend to adopt non-OOP styles.

The other reason is probably that there's enough OOP languages. The effort it takes to create a new OOP language exceeds the effort it takes to shoehorn your OOP algorithm into an existing OOP language. Therefore, there's less motivation from the engineering side.

On the other hand, there's still lots of scope for better functional style languages; that marketplace isn't exhausted yet. Rust, for instance, merges a lot of academic techniques trialled on functional languages with a systems programming architecture.

Most modern OO type systems rule out unsound inheritance. (Java, Scala, etc.)

I like the idea of encapsulating functions with data and like the ability to inherit to subclasses. I don't really like languages like java that enforce oop at the language level. I prefer languages like D, python or c++ that offer it as a tool but don't restrict you to writing strictly oop code. I find D's class implentation to be the simplest to understand. With classes being reference types with inheritence and structs being value types lacking inheritence. It makes it clear to me when a type should be a class and when it should be a struct or some other data type.

OOP is fine, and it makes sense for lots of things. But going crazy with OOP makes for a mess, and a lot of software and languages and tools have chosen "let's do OOP" over "let's do good software". So non OOP stuff is just the natural backlash to OOP gone wild.

I'd be interested to see a language like C# but with:

+ Immutable by default.

+ 'Free' functions, so they don't have to be in classes.

+ No inheritance.

+ Some sort of distinction, and I'm not clear how it would work yet, between data objects (immutable fields/properties and pure functions) and service objects (functions only, but with the ability to constructor inject dependencies).

+ Purity to be a method signature level contract, enforced by the compiler.

+ C# 8 approach to nullability, e.g. Maybe types.

+ Data 'shapes' as well as/rather than interfaces. So you can require that a method parameter must have some shape, e.g. some property or method, rather than having to implement the interface/inherit.

I think parts of these exist in lots of other languages, or are on C#'s roadmap, but every other language I've tried feels, to me, like it's missing the amazing productivity of C# (and I'd guess Java) where the available IDEs, packages and core libraries are still way ahead of many other languages.

I guess the described language might be closer to F#, but when I tried F# it felt like it was missing the obvious "here's how you actually build a thing" part. A lot of functional language material talks about avoiding state, or not changing state, but that's the point where most the applications I build actually do something useful. So for me it was missing obvious on-ramps for building a website, or a desktop application, perhaps things have changed more recently?

It’s a single keyword, the language guarantee you won’t have any instance fields or methods in these classes.

Global functions pollute namespaces, and auto-complete index. Static classes provide local namespaces for these functions, they also hide implementation details. I sometimes implement moderately complex pieces of functionality as a static class with just a single public method, the rest of the code is in private methods. These private methods don’t show in auto-complete in outside code, even if they’re extension methods. If such class grows too large for a single source file, C# has partial classes.

Some examples of where global functions might make sense, the Main function of a console application doesn't need to be in a class, or the general Utils and Helpers approach soon becomes cumbersome, you end up having to name things that don't really need names. While static classes can help organise these global functions you also end up playing the naming game when you don't need to. It might not be any improvement but it's an interesting thought exercise to imagine functions living in just a namespace, not a class.

I think in C# static still doesn't give you enough guarantees at either the class or member level. A static class can still have public static mutable members which is a horrible code smell. C# contains enough flexibility to do the things I want, e.g. make things static and readonly, but it's a lot of additional typing and I'd be interested in seeing the model reversed, e.g. immutable defaults with something like `public mutable class Foo` which I remember having seen in other places (F#?).

Strictly speaking namespaces don’t need names, either. But for medium to large projects they’re still useful, and enforced by the IDE.

> to imagine functions living in just a namespace, not a class.

You can place them into a namespace on the consumer side of the API, with `using static`. While not the same, might be good enough in practice: you normally have multiple `using` statements on top, for namespaces.

> I'd be interested in seeing the model reversed, e.g. immutable defaults with something like `public mutable class Foo`

I wouldn’t want immutable defaults, but I do want readonly classes and structures, with readonly being part of the type system.

BTW, the new value tuples with named fields is a step in the right direction https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mazhou/2017/05/26/c-7-serie... Useful but limited, I would prefer real immutable classes & structures. Currently I have to create them manually, mark all fields public readonly, implement the constructor, that’s more typing than I’d like.

I mean, it took over programming like a revolution, like structured programming, but structured->OO doesn't have anything nearly like the benefits of unstructured->structured. It seems like a good paradigm for a couple of problem domains, but IMHO, it got cargo-culted on to everything about mainstream programming without delivering much on the promises it got sold with in regard to increased productivity and code re-use.

Just look at the functional components and hooks in react.

They have just abandoned the class based syntax.

This raises the question: how have we concluded that these parts are bad? Inheritance is the easiest one - it tends to dramatically increase the surface for coupling, which is why composition is recommended over inheritance. Classes is more subtle; I would say the issue with classes is that they strongly encourage you to couple various aspects, as classes are a single programming construct with which you do data representation, data specification, interface declaration, interface implementation, code organization, plain old logic, state management, and sometimes types declaration and concurrency control.

It takes discipline and awareness to resist the temptation of baking many aspect of a program into one class (even more so when you have to come up with a name for each class - naming is costly!), whereas it's natural in a language where each of these aspects is addressed by a different language feature. Finally, this temptation is made even stronger because class hierarchies feel so elegant - you spent a lot of time designing your class hierarchy (deciding where each part of the logic goes, choosing if methods were public of private and so on, applying various design patterns, etc.) so that MUST mean you've produced quality code, right? We love to tell ourselves this story, when the truth is we wasted a lot of time on non-essential decisions.

So many programmers don't resist the temptation, and end up with a tangled inflexible mess.

Don't take my word for it - try a variety of 'OOP' and 'non-OOP' languages! You can't achieve a good understanding of this unless you have empirical perspectives from both the inside and outside.

One thing that doesn't help is there isn't an agreed-upon clear definition of OOP. There was one made by Alan Kay, but the mainstream language we call OOP are very far from embodying it. So OOP is more a fuzzy cultural notion: "this cluster of mainstream languages that use classes." I think it would by much easier to discuss all of this if we separated the notions of 'OOP' and 'class-based programming'.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html

OOP tends to encourage going through more layers of indirection than necessary or helpful, which makes the flow hard to follow. E.g. instead of just calling a library method, OOP frameworks might have you extending a framework class. This makes OOP code difficult to debug and maintain.

Also because mutable object state is problematic--it makes a large system harder to reason about and certan types of bugs more likely, and makes thread safety very difficult.

That said, "let’s write some classes without thinking about it!" pretty much sums up the criticism of OOP. You can't just throw your problem domain naively at some language structures and then blame the language when it doesn't work. I bet I could pick any programming paradigm and find a way to do it wronger than this.

(If I were doing an RPG of the sort in the articles, just off the top of my head, I'd probably end up with fairly abstract 'Creature', 'Item', and 'Action'/'Spell' classes, plus a big data table defining the various types of each of these and the ways they could interact. Your game designers shouldn't be worrying about compiling C++ in order to add a new type of dagger, after all!)

I worked in the industry myself for a year or so, on an MMO (back when they were the Next Big Thing) and while our game wasn't super optimized, OOP overhead wasn't even on our radar as an issue compared with rendering, wrangling art assets, Scaleform UI elements, dynamic loading of the same, and all the other bits and bobs.

(Not arguing that composition isn't often better, just that performance isn't usually a significant reason why.)

1. OOP is technically unsound

2. OOP is philosophically unsound

3. OOP is methodologically wrong

4. OOP is a hoax

[1] http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html

And even on "methodologically wrong", Stepanov's rationale is wrong. After programming in various languages for decades, to use his analogy, we had "proofs". Then the "axioms" of OOP were laid down.

Note also that Stepanov says that generic programming is for him the only possible way to program. I suspect (possibly wrongly?) that you adopt his criticism of OOP, but not the rest of his rather dogmatic statements.

The general idea of bundling data definitions with code that operates on the corresponding data seems to mesh well with how most people think and remains hugely popular. Encapsulation has proven useful. Runtime polymorphism is very useful in a proper context and all the languages that you list have some support for it, although this support is not taken to the extreme - e.g. it may be more useful to think of the number 42 as a value rather than as an Object. The most controversial feature is inheritance - deep inheritance hierarchies have proven problematic so new languages discourage it or provide limited support.

Another trend is that ideas from e.g. FP have also entered mainstream and there is an expectation that new languages will provide support for useful features associated with other paradigms so most new languages can be described as multiparadigm rather than strictly OOP.

In theory OOP is supposed to make it easier to do separation of concerns in reality separation of concerns is really hard and adding some syntax sugar didn't help.

It's hard to create an abstraction that isn't overboard or so specific it's not an abstraction.

It's hard to separate concerns if you just inherit those concerns.

Testing OOP inheritance is awkward so most people don't and use dependancy injected instead which kinda breaks the whole point of inheritance and OOP.

OOP makes it look like you have separated concerns but in reality you where concerned with the wrong thing (most likely nouns) and spread the real concern throughout the whole project.

I think the old school OOP of Classes is dead and the newer Traits and Object composition will take over, or functional programming which is very Gucci at the moment.

Inheritance has too easy syntax to avoid "accidental duplication" (pieces of code seem similar on short term but eventually differ on the long run) without creating a new common abstraction to depend on: even before realizing the introduced dependencies are unnecessary but now even deeply entangled. Because in its core what might just happened is "raw" code(text) reuse instead abstraction reuse. "Code duplication is better than wrong abstraction." Or "Write code what is easy to delete."

You might keep adding and adding until you won't be able to substract, because you have to check every dependency back and forth, and there are no layers of abstractions but a constant change of [meaning] with the hope of usefulness in future infinite far away. Additionally intermediate level classes also need names (and meaning...) which makes the naming problem constant and might even blur the clear lines between the originally clear abstractions. The language of our system/domain consists of the relation of individual abstractions, we can't just overload every word and/or litter with unnecessary ones.

It's also a question to decide when to write a class and instantiate instead of just using an adhoc "anonymous" object and use a necessary pattern like factory function or some delegation (like parent class) later if needed. (Ofc. classes might be created later as well, but weird enough it goes the other way around in my xp, maybe its just me, ruined by noob Java 1.6/C# habits gained at the first years of university).

It's too easy to find wrong abstractions with inheritance, too easy to blur good ones, and too hard/exhausting to delete them.

Reflection on the thread: I think I'll focus more on the proper naming of functions "DO"s instead of "WHAT"s, because DOs must have clear intent to drive the design/architecture.

I haven't used Julia, but it seems that Nim has inheritance[1]. Rust has traits that can have default methods, so it's closer to Java and C# in that regard.

OOP is quite useful, it's easy to write bad code in any language (and I've seen lots of it in golang for instance, which, due to the nature of the language, ended up making it even more difficult to follow than badly written Java for instance). So be careful to not fall for the hype that is going on.

[1] https://nim-lang.org/docs/tut2.html#object-oriented-programm...

Datastructures are important for storing data. Functions are important for manipulating data.

Just because they're both abou data, doesn't mean that they belong naturally together.

I personally find "moveEntity(player, x, y, z);" (and the implications) prettier than "player->move(x,y,z);"

Now, if only my C could have first-class functions, without any other consequences to the language or runtime, I'd be supper happy, but I'm sure there's some fundamental reason that's impossible.

Then again, I'm a pretty crappy software developer.

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/object-oriented-progr...

I find complex business logic tends to be best modelled using algebraic data types and functional programming.

Breaks down quickly in big projects though.

The best code I’ve seen is well documented and minimizes stateful code that’s easy to follow.

Somehow the culture around Java became something similar too:

Documentation: Nah I have types. Stateful code: Nah I just don’t affect other objects (but...maybe just in these 1000 places). Easy to follow: Nah I follow pattern x and y without documenting it and not enforcing it strictly, also I have so many classes so it should be easy to follow.

For example, Rust itself doesn't know if it is OOP or not: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch17-01-what-is-oo.html

Go similarly doesn't know: https://golang.org/doc/faq#Is_Go_an_object-oriented_language

Nim claims to be a multi-paradigm language with full support for OOP: https://nim-lang.org/docs/tut2.html

Julia doesn't seem to discuss OOP that I could find. But if Common Lisp has long claimed and been described as supporting OOP, and Julia copying its dispatch system from Common Lisp, it similarly is in a weird place of is it OOP or not?

Bottom line... I think a lot of new and popular languages are at least partially OOP. That they are more hybrids of prior languages, that they dropped certain features and added others is normal, since they are trying to be different and distinguish themselves, but they all seem to still have enough of OOP to not be sure if they should claim to be OOP or not.

You've heard of the "God-class" anti-patern. Java style classes are a "God-abstraction".

I think the main advantage of OOP is message passing - which, if you think about it, is pretty how networking works across the board. (This also makes sense if you think about Smalltalk's heritage).

Basically - if I send a message to a networked server - as long as my message is in the correct format and I send it to the right place - then I don't care about the implementation at the other end.

The fact that I send a GET request to HAProxy that analyses it, routes it and then passes it to Nginx that embellishes it and passes it to some application server that actually does the work is OOP in action. As the message sender, I need to know the protocol (message format) and where to send it - and that's it. The fact that the implementation goes through three layers and does who knows what is irrelevant.

The trouble is people looked at Smalltalk and took the wrong bits to be important (just like Steve Jobs did when Apple designed the Lisa GUI).

'Modern' OO languages are never natural. Actors are more natural.

A typical day-to-day Java Spring web service workflow:

1. Receive request in Controller.

2. Get FooRepository in through DI.

3. Read a user from UserRepository (behind UserRepository is a SQL database).

4. Get another stuff from DI, say EmailService.

5. Call EmailService to send email based on properties of Foo.

6. Return OK to the client.

Let's see what's in the example:

1. Controller/Repository/Service/Container/Request are not objects. They are made up engineering concepts.

2. The User seems to be a reasonable object, but actually, it's not. It's dead, it only temporarily revives when you summon it from the database, then becomes dead again. It does not know how to do things, it cannot even repeatedly check the current time and then send email itself just like any person in the real world. In contrast, actors are mostly long live in-memory processes and can tell anyone do anything at any time.

Why it's bad or I should say, redundant?

1. Consider Controllers, Services or other objects, if you have 100 methods on a single class it's considered a code smell. Then guys in the project will refactor it to 10 different made up classes with 10 methods each. The name of the classes and their relationships to methods are totally arbitrary, 10 people will yield 10 totally different results.

2. The User is just data, there is no point in make them objects. A) The OO has an in-memory reference system but it's awkward when combining with database entity ids or any kind of distributed environment. B) OO class is redundant because struct or algebra data type (ADT) will do, and they have much better semantics on equality. C) When it comes to modeling OO is more awkward than ADT (because there's no sum type). When it comes polymorphism (the main advertised aspect of OO) the sub-type polymorphism is more awkward than parametric polymorphism.

Personal conclusion (at least in the Web scenario): Functional style (ADT + functions) is simpler. Actor style is intuitive for the real-time web system. 'Modern' OO is both awkward and redundant because no one is doing OO in web programming anyway.

The established meaning is using classes as some kind of abstract data type with getters and setters or using classes interfaces. That kind of OOP is usually supported.

It hasn't lived up to the hype? It's not the One Right Way to write all software? OK.

But it's still something that thousands of programmers find useful as a way to build their programs. That's not exactly "failure".

(BTW, ploeh.dk is inaccessible, at least to me.)

And I worked with large, fairly OO-oriented codebases in JS, and it was fine and I didn't miss inheritance.

My experience is that hierarchy is more trouble than worth.

And I did like the fun of trying to figure out a hierarchy for existing system. But after a year in use, I woul look at the hierarchy with the 'what was I thinking' look.

So I moved from nesting abstractions with classes to dependency injection to mostly passing well-defined data to functions.

Like, after I understood prototypes in js, I used them for a bit, but then I switched back to passing data-structures to functions :)

There might be another reason why new languages are moving away from this kind of specifying hierarchies. There are already several languages with ecosystems built around hierarchies, so if you are fine with java, you probably wouldn't jump to golang :)

Imperative programming coupled with data oriented design and Entity Component System tend to be much cleaner and a lot more efficient. Instead of thinking of how to apply a pattern to complicate things a bit, you focus on the problem to solve.

Programmers have noticed that infinite abstraction was not necessarily a good thing to have (or an easy one to achieve with a good design).

They had neglected alternative paradigms and lower level languages. They had hoped to just abstract C away, and forget about it. Now they want to replace C instead of abstracting it away.

That leads to the belief that OOP is unnecessarily difficult.

It's more difficult to properly decompose the problem space than it is to just add code.

It really just boils down to developers being lazy and ignorant.

However, the reason why we use say, structured programming, functional programming and OOP is because abstractions are always helpful for people. It makes it easier to think about the solution to a problem.

In my opinion, OODesign came at a moment where GUI development was really strong, and the 1:1 mapping from "window", "button", "menu", from real-life to the computing space was very useful. However, as we continue modeling more complex processes and entities in computers, that mapping becomes more cumbersome both in the encapsulation and even the naming (who has not wasted time coming up with a proper name for THAT class, or the infamous SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstanceFactory). This is where OO fails IMO.

I think we need languages that bring new paradigms. All that you quoted fail in this respect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fpDlAEQio4

Nim isn't object oriented either, it's procedural oriented just like C. Experienced Nim devs avoid methods and inheritance and only use them after very careful considerations.

Mutation is needed to implement low-level stuff and have deterministic memory usage.

What's an "object" anyway? A collection of data fields bound to a method is what most people would probably consider. In which case, both golang and Rust have objects.

The most telling sign is how many FP languages are in existence today. If it was such a good thing we wouldn't need them all. It is a mess that cause many other types of problems without any clear benefit.

I do get that many people like the FP paradigm, no two humans are alike and people will find different ways of thinking and reasoning about a problem more suitable. Which is OK. BUT it doesn't mean FP is a any better than OPP or vice versa.

Last I would like to point out how Python (OOP) obliterated R (FP) it the Data Science market although R enjoyed a head start of few years and was the Franca Lingua of statisticians.

Python didn't beat R because it's OO. It won because of its existing popularity (with many people learning it in their intro programming class) and the massive amounts of open source software built for it.

> People just don't have enough experience with Functional Programming to really know how awful it is

This is just anecdotal, but I've used a FP language full-time for the last two years with several other engineers and ramped others up on the codebase. It has its own challenges but it's significantly easier for me to reason about than OOP - less bugs, easier to maintain, easier to parse. I can't see myself ever willingly going back.

It might be helpful to know what problems you think FP has, if you have a significant amount of experience with it.

My point that it beat R although it is OOP. This is to show that OOP is not inherently bad. Many people find it useful to the point the 'preserved' advantages of FP are not worth the effort.

> This is just anecdotal ...

My anecdote story is very different than yours. To the point if one of my engineers will ever suggest FP again he will get fired on the spot.

If you are going to react so disproportionately to the mere suggestion of FP, I am sorry, it is difficult to take your anecdote or opinion seriously.

This is a silly argument. FP means only first-class functions and immutable values, and the vast majority of FP languages agree on those.

But there are many other design decisions for a programming language - type system, laziness, purity, homoiconicity, and whatever other features, paradigms or constraints people might find desirable. THIS is what explains the diversity of FP languages.

Btw, there's the exact same phenomenon in OOP languages. They all agree on classes, and differ on hundreds of other aspects.

Also, the question asked doesn’t actually care about FP. Go isn’t a functional language, bit neither is it OO.

My point regarding the number of FP languages that it is not a silver bullet, neither is OOP to be sure, but FP has its own set of problems hence the many different implementations.

Regarding OOP languages implementing classic FP features, which is true and a blessing! These are good features which IMHO gives more credit to OOP languages.

Making a new language doesn’t automaticly imply that some other language got something wrong.

Sadly, there seems to be almost no functional programming concepts supported that I'd use (map, filter, reduce, lambdas). I think the lack of generics and operator overloading might have something to do with that?

Thankfully people started to look behind the curtain and noticed that the whole "industrial-scale ceremony" that was built around the few good OOP ideas actually hinders software development, so they took the few good pieces and integrated them into the new languages we're starting to see now.

20 years late, but better late than never :)

(PS: watch the same cycle unfold around functional languages in the next 20 years)

That being said iS an area where OOP is definitively worse than FP: In fact OOP (as defined by JAVA and C++) is Categorically less modular than FP.

There is concrete and definitive reasoning behind why this is the case.

I've explained it all in a thread before I'll just link it for people who disagree or are curious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19910450

to me map/reduce feel like a further development of structured programming. a map(...) call is less expressive / more constrained than a loop and that's the point; compare to how loops and if/else can all be written with goto, but we prefer the more structured alternative