Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

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ChrisMarshallNY

OOP, when done badly, is an eight-gauge footgun.

I should know, I've blown off most of my toes.

But, you know what they say:

"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."

I have pretty good judgment, these days (see "toes," above).

Well-written OOP, on the other hand, is a marvel of Quality, simplicity, maintainability, performance, and refactorability.

We often like to blame a tool, when it's really PEBCAK.

It's like we go to a bar, one night, and there's this old blues guy, alone, with a beat-up Telly and an old Peavey amp, making music that sounds like it came straight from God's House Band. It looks effortless.

So we rush home, buy a PRS guitar, and a Mesa Boogie amp, strike a pose, and hit the strings.

The cat grabs his favorite dead rat, and heads for the hills, never to be seen again.

The kids delete their TikToks.

The wife calls a lawyer.

Maybe there's something to be said for learning mastery of a tool, before disparaging it.

A good tool drives the wielder towards success.

Given how frequently I hear something along the lines of "OOP is great; you're just doing it wrong!", I'm inclined to believe it actually isn't so great.

Define "good."

I hear functional programming is great.

Not so sure I'd write a driver with it, though.

Everyone loves to rain hate on C++. I ran a C++ shop for 25 years, and have heard it all.

Listen. It's current fashion to hate OOP, and I'll never convince anyone otherwise, so I'll just back off, and let y'all think what you will.

For me, I like some of the new stuff. If you you look at the links in my comment elsewhere in this thread, you'll see some of the transitions that I've made, from an older, OOP/delegate-based model, to one that leverages protocols and closures. I'm not averse at all to learning new tech, but I've found a lot of mileage in combining it with classic patterns.

> I hear functional programming is great. Not so sure I'd write a driver with it, though.

Why not?

It may be great for drivers.

You see, I am not an expert functional programmer. I already know that it won't work well, for the UI-based stuff that I do, and, in my experience, UI programming, and device control programming, share a lot of patterns. But that may also be, because I am not actually in a position to render much judgment on the matter.

But, like I said. I am not an expert on FC. I have liked using some of its contributions to my favorite language (Swift), but that doesn't really give me the authority to make any really big statements on the pattern (like, for instance, "FC is bad for drivers").

See how it feels, when people throw shade on something that you know well?

> See how it feels, when people throw shade on something that you know well?

My feeling is mostly that of confusion. I spent several years writing OOP, and then learned pure FP, and now that's all I do. Pure FP is the best thing I have ever used for UI programming.

My confusion is not from you "throwing shade" on something I know well. Rather, it's from you throwing shade on something you — by your own admission — are not in "a position to render much judgement".

I'm not actually "throwing shade." I just said, and I quote:

> "I hear functional programming is great. Not so sure I'd write a driver with it, though."

That's not an insult.

Your comment wasn't, either -technically, but it wasn't quite as nuanced. It said that OOP was, by inference, a bad thing.

> "Given how frequently I hear something along the lines of "OOP is great; you're just doing it wrong!", I'm inclined to believe it actually isn't so great."

Like I said, this has descended to a religious debate, and I won't play, anymore.

But this is a big world, and there's many different things going on. I know that I'm an old "OK boomer," but I have also been writing ship software for over thirty-five years, so there's a vanishingly small chance, that I may actually have some valid points to make.

There is such a thing as a bad tool. In most industries, they simply refuse to use the tool anymore. Not so much in software development, for some reason.

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