Object-Oriented Programming – The Trillion Dollar Disaster ️ | Hacker News Reader

Object-Oriented Programming – The Trillion Dollar Disaster ️

medium.com

11 pointsilyasuz10 comments

This is.... quite strikingly poorly written - no research even by self admission on most of this: "The complexity graph is not based on any research, it simply reflects my own experience working with Object-Oriented, Procedural and Functional Programming."

We all can say negative things about any paradigm or pattern - but this is quite a hit piece. Proposing "functional programming" as a replacement is quite ignorant of many (vast majority?) of platforms and realities of programming different kinds of software (especially event driven).

Functional Programming is notoriously hard to ramp engineers onto, or for folks that join a team with a codebase written as such it can be extremely difficult.

Maybe I should write one; "Medium - the Trillion Dollar Mistake"

I agree. Not to mention that functional programming has been around for decades. The reason why it's not popular is simple: because most people hate it and it's even more complex than OOP.

One doesn't need to look for conspiracy theories about functional programming when there is none.

It's difficult to take an article seriously when it has an emoji at the end of every sentence.... It was so distracting I could not read past the first paragraph.

I made it through the first half. Even though it claims to be all about issues with modern hybrid-OOP languages, it's pretty much the same false dichotomy of pure OOP vs. pure FP that you see nowadays as everyone's "Yet Another Considered Harmful" post.

I'm sure there are a few decent observations in there that might be novel, but it's not really worth plowing through predictable rants about mutable state, inheritance, tortured DI architecture, and software-is-not-animals to get to them.

He didn't really acknowledge many of the things one might do in modern OO design to address those things, like favoring delegates and interfaces over inheritance, favoring shallow class hierarchies, or not inverting control just to unit test.

This isn't surprising, since one of the core tenets he puts out early is that his issue is OO is a loaded gun that lets you shoot yourself in the foot despite best intentions, vs. (apparently) FP that always keeps you honest by limiting your options.

Most of this probably sounds familiar. Overall, it feels like it's been written by someone who hasn't been around the scene long enough to know exactly how well-trodden their criticisms are.

Indeed. I believe you can't post some/most emoji in hacker news. I'm glad hn disallows this.

I don't have a source for it though. apparently some emoji are allowed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18495803

I was just about to comment the same thing.

Opened it up, saw a bunch of emoji's and subsequently decided this was not serious enough to warrant my time.

It'd be cool to have something automated to de-mojify articles and such, I've encountered this style of emoji-heavy writing before.

On the one hand, maybe it would be nice. On the other hand, this style of writing is essentially a subtitle in all-caps saying "I don't know how to write properly and this isn't worth your time", which has its own use in, well, saving me time.

Wow, this was not an exaggeration.

Does the poor quality of this article have something to tell us about Medium and pieces published there? What about it could cause it to attract particularly poorly constructed and sourced arguments?

Or is this just Sturgeon's Law at work?

Both?

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