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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of potential side-effects for vaccines as well. The last time I had one, I had a relatively unpleasant reaction.

So I'm not saying that there aren't fair criticisms of object-oriented programming. But "the case against OOP" is not proven by real numbers and repeated experiments. It's the most successful programming paradigm in history. The evidence for the success of OOP is more overwhelming than for any vaccine. Yet we're stilling debating boogeyman like mercury in vaccines and inheritance in OOP.

Re-writing hackernews in a functional stack might be trivial. But what about the web browser, the GUI environment, the OS kernel? OOP based software stacks are everywhere. And there is no need to re-write anything because it all works fine.

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That it's successful doesn't mean it's also a good idea. To quote Dennis Ritchy: "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success". I feel this could probably be paraphrased to OOP as well.

OOP isn't super terrible, but it does mix some good ideas with bad ones. Newer languages tend to not be fully "OOP" but do include some of the better ideas from it. OOP isn't the end-goal of programming, it's a stepping stone.

Same applies to functional programming by the way; a lot of non-functional languages include various features pioneered in functional programming languages.

> That it's successful doesn't mean it's also a good idea.

No, but success brings out nothing but contrarians. You don't get an article on hacker news saying everything is fine and working well even if that is the reality.

You can't make money selling alternative medicine by claiming that medicine works. Newer languages, in my opinion, are going backwards in a lot of ways out of fear of ideas that shouldn't be feared.

Obviously being against the common trend is always going to get more attention, but it makes no sense to assume that those people are wrong strictly because of that.

The fact that vaccines are widely used doesn't make anti-vax stupid. Anti-vax is stupid, because a lot of real research has gone into vaccines, and they really do work. The arguments anti-vaxers use are not based on reality, and can easily be proven wrong. The same can NOT be said about programming paradigms.

There is no proof that OOP produces more elegant, simpler, higher quality software with smaller programming effort than other paradigms. OOP isn't proven to work; it's proven to be an attractive choise

Isn't there proof? I mean there are plenty of alternative programming paradigms -- some that have been around since the 60's and still promoted as alternatives today. Where is that success to compare?

Show me that an alternative to OOP is statically more successful and I'll switch tomorrow.

It seems like you really want it out to be merely popularity rather than being simply successful. That's not a rational position.

> But what about the web browser, the GUI environment, the OS kernel?

Firefox is being rewritten in Rust, which is not oop. Linux kernel is in C, which is not oop.

Eclipse SWT, a very succesful java GUI, uses composition over inheritance.

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