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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I get the hesitation from people used to C# or Java where OOP has always been the law of the land, but the rest of us who have used D, C++ or Python... to name a few... OOP is fully optional, and that's how I want OOP in any language, give me multi-paradigm any day of the week.

I would have loved Go more if they had made "lightweight" classes a thing, something feels wrong tying structs and functions, you could have added a wrapper around both to make the code more organized. I guess that's what I like about OOP, organized code. I don't even care about most OOP things, I just want to organize code in a meaningful way.

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Kotlin has optional OOP on the JVM. I still use it, but sparingly. Barely ever classes inherit from other classes in my code; I use interfaces, mostly to be able to fake services for testing.

Most of what I write are functions and data objects (records, basically).

One pattern I use is classes with one function, where the constructor takes the functions dependencies, and the function only takes non-dependency parameters.

Functions and data objects are translated into OOP related JVM bytecodes.

Which is why, something like

    fun square(num: Int): Int = num * num

gets translated into

   public final class ExampleKt {
     public static final int square(int);
       0: iload_0
       1: iload_0
       2: imul
       3: ireturn
      }
    }

When running javap on the .class file.

People really should understand what they talk about avoiding OOP.

OOP is not optional in Python though, unless you are speaking about pre-2.0 Python, before everything became object instances, Smalltalk style.

You can have naked (top-level) functions in Python right? Are they also in instances of classes?

Functions are an object in Python too, I think that's why they're trying to get at. So you can do some funky things with them if you really want.

You certainly don't have to write OO Python if you don't want to. Objecting to functions being objects like the person you're replying to is, is a flavour of puritanism I find baffling.

They definitely are,

       Python 3.15.0 (tags/v3.15.0:d220409, Oct  9 2026, 11:55:56) [MSC v.1951 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
       Enter "help" below or click "Help" above for more information.
       >>> def sum(x,y):
              return x + y

       >>> sum(40, 2)
       42

       >>> type(sum)
       <class 'function'>

       >>> dir(sum)
       ['__annotate__', '__annotations__', '__builtins__', '__call__', '__class__', '__closure__', '__code__', '__defaults__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__get__', '__getattribute__', '__getstate__', '__globals__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__init_subclass__', '__kwdefaults__', '__le__', '__lt__', '__module__', '__name__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__qualname__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', '__type_params__']

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