I had to bail out about 1/3rd of the way through. Wow, what a rant.
I don't mind the invective, and I'm becoming more skeptical of OOP the more I see larger-scale FP apps work. Mutable state and hidden dependencies are killing us. But I do not like the way this essay is arguing its case. Please do not trot out famous people, tell me their ideas, and then show me how things did not work out for them.
Frankly, I couldn't care less what Alan Kay thinks of OOP. Or Bjorne. Or any of the others. I'm sure they're nice people, and probably a million times smarter than I am. What I'm interested in is this: why do people who know multiple ways of creating a solution pick OOP? And does it fulfill the implied promises it makes to those folks?
The classic example is the statement "OOP is required for creating and maintaining large systems, because it forces developers to think about where things go first, ahead of what the system does."
So here we are presented with a problem: large-scale systems with lots of developers have a difficult time working without a clear definition of where everything goes and how it works together. From my experience that seems like a reasonable problem to consider. So let's talk about that problem, how OOP helps, and how OOP falls down on the job.
Repeat and rinse. Then we get a list of real-world problems that choosing OOP is supposed to help with. We also can start creating some success criteria for both OOP and non-OOP projects.
Otherwise, our arguments get caught up in personalities and theory-of-the-universe crap that doesn't really go anywhere. I can line up a dozen experts, cherry-pick some quotes, and rant away. A person disagreeing with me can do the same. Then we can each talk about how the theoretical system the other guy's way of solving things is built on a shaky foundation. The other guy will demonstrate that this is incorrect by citing an example. It's not productive.
The reason it is not productive is that it is trying to make a universal case based on theory, as if programming were some sort of extension of calculus or geometry. Yes, I understand the association with category theory and such, but programming is the act of multiple humans coming together and creating some better way of doing things for another group of humans. Yes, languages are mathematical, but programming isn't. You want better programming, you'd better start listing out a bunch of ways humans screw the pooch when they're trying to make stuff, then try to help them stop doing that. You don't trot out the set theory books. Wrong answer.
Think in terms of machine language. At the end of the day, bits gotta go somewhere -- both data bits and coding bits. Instead of trying to say "well, we always do things this way because $FamousAuthorX told us", it might be much better to say "we have this process that allows us to dynamically change the method of grouping that proceeds like so"
This is much better because it starts with the problem and lets the solution evolve. Instead of starting with already knowing the solution and then just taking the problem and a big hammer and making it all work [insert long argument for mixed-mode languages here, like Ocaml or F#]
ADD: I also note that developers love making things complicated, and OOP is like a massive playland where you can run off and make complicated stuff all day long. Become your inner architecture astronaut. This is extremely difficult for many to resist.
I decided to just simply stop arguing and just learn every style I could. As much as I want to be a white knight who "saves" software engineering by convincing everyone to use the most efficient way to work, it's never going to happen. I'm not even sure I know the must efficient way.
The biggest obstacle is the anti-intellectualism which weighs down every argument. Very few people even want to learn something new, they just want the ego boost of knowing they shouldn't have to.
So now I lead a study group reading through SICP and I call it a day. Better to train up a cohort of people who want to learn than argue with those who even if proved 100% wrong will never budge.
Key question to ask yourself: assuming you had a good team that could talk about things, if the other three guys on your team wanted to try something new, but you thought it was a bad idea, would you keep an open mind and give it a good shot? Or would you dig in and come up with the 74 thousand reasons it sucks?
There are a lot of really smart guys out there that can argue any subject from any angle better than anybody else in the room. They view conversations as debates and discussions around direction as something that can be "lost" or "won". There's a right and wrong answer, and these guys are almost always right.
I had to bail out about 1/3rd of the way through. Wow, what a rant.
I don't mind the invective, and I'm becoming more skeptical of OOP the more I see larger-scale FP apps work. Mutable state and hidden dependencies are killing us. But I do not like the way this essay is arguing its case. Please do not trot out famous people, tell me their ideas, and then show me how things did not work out for them.
Frankly, I couldn't care less what Alan Kay thinks of OOP. Or Bjorne. Or any of the others. I'm sure they're nice people, and probably a million times smarter than I am. What I'm interested in is this: why do people who know multiple ways of creating a solution pick OOP? And does it fulfill the implied promises it makes to those folks?
The classic example is the statement "OOP is required for creating and maintaining large systems, because it forces developers to think about where things go first, ahead of what the system does."
So here we are presented with a problem: large-scale systems with lots of developers have a difficult time working without a clear definition of where everything goes and how it works together. From my experience that seems like a reasonable problem to consider. So let's talk about that problem, how OOP helps, and how OOP falls down on the job.
Repeat and rinse. Then we get a list of real-world problems that choosing OOP is supposed to help with. We also can start creating some success criteria for both OOP and non-OOP projects.
Otherwise, our arguments get caught up in personalities and theory-of-the-universe crap that doesn't really go anywhere. I can line up a dozen experts, cherry-pick some quotes, and rant away. A person disagreeing with me can do the same. Then we can each talk about how the theoretical system the other guy's way of solving things is built on a shaky foundation. The other guy will demonstrate that this is incorrect by citing an example. It's not productive.
The reason it is not productive is that it is trying to make a universal case based on theory, as if programming were some sort of extension of calculus or geometry. Yes, I understand the association with category theory and such, but programming is the act of multiple humans coming together and creating some better way of doing things for another group of humans. Yes, languages are mathematical, but programming isn't. You want better programming, you'd better start listing out a bunch of ways humans screw the pooch when they're trying to make stuff, then try to help them stop doing that. You don't trot out the set theory books. Wrong answer.
Think in terms of machine language. At the end of the day, bits gotta go somewhere -- both data bits and coding bits. Instead of trying to say "well, we always do things this way because $FamousAuthorX told us", it might be much better to say "we have this process that allows us to dynamically change the method of grouping that proceeds like so"
This is much better because it starts with the problem and lets the solution evolve. Instead of starting with already knowing the solution and then just taking the problem and a big hammer and making it all work [insert long argument for mixed-mode languages here, like Ocaml or F#]
ADD: I also note that developers love making things complicated, and OOP is like a massive playland where you can run off and make complicated stuff all day long. Become your inner architecture astronaut. This is extremely difficult for many to resist.