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0 pointscurtis9y ago0 comments

My personal suspicion is that the problem there wasn't OOP, it was frameworks.

0 comments

… and dogma. There was a lot of blather about hour Everyone Serious needed this complex structure and a lot of people superstitiously followed it without asking whether e.g. advice from a 2k engineer megaproject in a different industry was applicable to their 3 person in-house app.

The modern counterpart is probably scalability — I see a lot of parallels in all of the Google/Facebook-envy applied to “big data” problems which can fit on an iPad.

colorint9y ago

I think OOP will always run into the problem that it requires a taxonomical theory about your problem, which never holds up in reality. (This is just another way of saying, inheritance has to be a forest/bundle of disjoint trees. Yes, there's multiple inheritance, but I'm pretty sure acknowledging that is a mortal sin among OO types.) Haskell is slightly better, since typeclasses are less topologically constrained, but I suspect requiring ANY categorical theory about your problem is going to create mischief in the long run.

marcosdumay9y ago

The problem is people not using abstract taxonomies.

If people keep trying to force code organization around the business jargon, they will keep getting the same awful result. It does not matter if they are writing OOP, Abstract Data Types, FP, or direct bits manipulation with assembly.

goatlover9y ago

But then you end up growing your taxonomy ad-hoc. Also, Python does multiple inheritance sanely, and so does Eiffel.

pekk9y ago

Python might do nearly as well as any language could do with multiple inheritance, but "sanely" is relative, like finding the sanest way to drive two cars at once.

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kabdib9y ago

Yeah, pretty much everyone and his brother had a framework:

- Apple, MacApp

- Microsoft: MFC, and others

- Borland: I forget what they called their stuff

- Anyone remember Taligent? Apple, HP and IBM, all getting together in a money-burning party...

- NeXT / Apple revival: NextStep / OpenStep, etc.

- Any number of minor players, including folks with Honest to Goodness Smalltalk implementations (none of which have survived to this day, I believe)

- Java stuff that I have mercifully forgotten

... they were nearly all crazy, and nothing was portable. So much for the promise of OOP :-)

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