The Post-OOP Paradigm

Kallahar writes "American Scientist has an article up about Computing Science: The Post-OOP Paradigm. The article has a great overview of how OOP works, and then goes on to a brief outline of the possible successors to OOP such as Aspect, Pattern, and Extreme Programming. Also a pretty picture of OOP Spaghetti."

Comments

OOP is frequently the wrong answer

[joe cow]

I don't think OOP is dead. Certainly these languages don't have the foundation necessary to overtake OOP's good features: inheritance, (and thus code reuse) and methods.

However most OOP programmers try to over-OO everything. This is a problem from day one - their instructors show them how to make an object and how cool it is to have the object do something on its own. Thereafter, the students objectize everything. This leads to situations where you've got horribly bloated code that runs slow as hell.

It's this kind of instruction that leads to programmers writing whole object-oriented interfaces to things that can be very easily manipulated without all the overhead. For example I had a consultant working (briefly) with me who wrote several thousand lines of code that would edit colon delimited files (like /etc/passwd, for example) when a simple strtok in C or split() in perl would have done the trick in a few lines, without all that code to debug.

People need to always take a step back and see if the language contstructs they plan to use are appropriate for the task at hand. More often than not, they'll find that they higher level languages are too much. Don't write a C program when you can write it in shell. Don't write daemonizing code in your app if it can run from /etc/inittab. Don't write a scheduler when you can do it in cron. And never write OO when procedural programming can do the same trick in less space.

Re:OOP is frequently the wrong answer

[yuri]

That's not OO programming, thats a useless programmer, who wastes more time and creates more bugs than a perl programmer just made redundant.

A good OO design would of encapsulated the functionality in a small class. not thousands of lines, just a few more.

Broken OOP Model

[Titusdot Groan]

I might be a bit more inclined to believe the article if the example given wasn't one of the standard OOP pitfalls -- implementing object properties using inheritance.

A real shape library would have methods like isConvex() and numberOfSides() instead of implementing the number of sides as an infinite number of subclasses (triangle, quadrilateral, etc.)

Perhaps these guys should have read Antipatterns or Pitfalls of Object Oriented Development instead of wasting their time with this article.

True of most fresh programmers

[Gorimek]

There is some truth to that, I'm sure, but I'm not aware that programmers schooled in any other methodology are perfect programmers straight out of school. It's a tough craft, and it takes a few years of being an idiot until you start producing really good code, regardless of methodology.