I’m surprised this is considered a controversial take.
You can write spaghetti in any language or paradigm. People will go overboard on DRY while ignoring that inheritance is more or less just a mechanism for achieving DRY for methods and fields.
FP wizards can easily turn your codebase into a complex organism that is just as “impenetrable” as OOP. But as you say, fads are fads are fads, and OOP was the previous fad so it behooves anyone who wants to look “up to date” to be performative about how they know better.
Personally I think it’s obvious that anyone passing around structs that contain data and functions that act on that data is the same concept as passing around objects. I expect you can even base a trait off of another trait in Rust.
But don’t dare call it what it actually is, because this industry really is as petulant as you describe.
I think every new technology or idea is created because it solves some problems, but in the long run, we'll discover that it creates other problems. For example, transpiling javascript, C++ OO, actors, coroutines, docker, microkernels, and so on.
When a new idea appears, we're much more aware of the benefits it brings. But we don't know the flaws yet. So we naively hope there are no flaws - and the new idea is universally good.
But its rare to change something and not have that cause problems. It just always takes awhile for the problems to really show up and spoil the party. I guess you could think of it as the hype cycle - first hype, then disillusionment, then steady state.
Sometimes I play this game with new technology. "In 10 years, people will be complaining about this on hackernews. What do I guess they'll be saying about it?". For rails, people complain about its deep magic. For rust, I think it'll be how hard it is to learn. For docker, that it increases the size of deployments for no reason. And that its basically static linking with more steps.
Calling everything a fad is too cynical for me, because it implies that progress is impossible. But plenty of tools have made my life as a software developer better. I prefer typescript over javascript. I prefer cargo over makefile / autotools / cmake / crying. Preemptive schedulers are better than your whole computer freezing. High level languages beat programming in assembly.
Its just hard to say for sure how history will look back on any particular piece of tech in 20 years time. Fortran lost to C, even though its better in some ways. I think C++ / Java style OO will die a slow death, in favour of data oriented design and interfaces / traits (Go / Rust style). I could be wrong, but thats my bet.
> I think it’s obvious that anyone passing around structs that contain data and functions that act on that data is the same concept as passing around objects.
I hear what you're saying - but there's some important differences about the philosophy of how we conceptualise our programs. OO encourages us to think of nouns that "do" some verb. Using structs and functions (like C and Rust) feels much more freeform to me. Yegge said it better: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...
But lets see in 20 years. Maybe OO will be back, but I doubt it. I think if we can learn anything from the history of CS, its that functional programming had basically all the right ideas 40 years ago. Its just taking the rest of us decades to notice.
Although Java/C# make you put functions in a class, you aren't compelled to think of a class as a "noun". Just call it "Utils" or something like that. A class is just a thing that you can put functions and / or data in. Use that however you want.
The word "module" comes to mind. A class in Java can be viewed as a software module, of which more than one instance can be created. Sometimes, this is even the best way to view the class. Other times, it's better to view it as a class representing some noun.
A thing like a "comparator" or an "XYZ factory" is not a domain noun, but rather a pluggable code module.
if anything, in C#, you can import the entire class as `using static MyFunctions;` and make such functions top-level. Well, usually you write an extension method instead since most functions act on some form of data but you get the idea.
(can also be imported globally with 'global using static ..' in a usings file)
Yeah, the problem with OO isn’t really in the languages. The problem is in the community, and what people consider “best practice”. C#, Java and C++ are all arguably multi-paradigm languages. They give you a lot of flexibility in how you structure your code. C# and C++ support value types. Modern Java has great support for a lot of FP concepts too.
So I agree with you. You can write good C# if you want to. The problem is that a lot of people - for some strange reason - actively choose to make their programs heavily OOP.
Maybe we need to tease "community" apart from language. Let's have Java / C# "A" people (who need at least 10 levels of inheritance, gotta use DI, insist on every character of SOLID (and actually remember and care about the Liskov substitution principle - and insist that it wasn't chosen simply because it starts with "L" and makes the acronym sound better) and have never written any code that added any value - only frameworks. Then we can have Java / C# "B" people that care about allocations, hate DI, avoid inheritance, know when they are messing up cache line hits and even feel slightly bad a about using generics.
Something like that, pick your tribe or, even better, be an individual and do whatever (TF) you want.
Yep. That’s why I prefer to criticise OOP (and in particular, inheritance). Not specific languages.
I met this old guy at a conference one, ~15 years ago. He said he didn’t get why people say Java is slow. His Java, he said, runs just as fast as C. I asked him to show me his code - and I’m so glad I did. It was amazing. He did everything in one big static class, and treated Java as if it were a funny way to write C. He ignored almost the entire standard library. No wonder his code ran fast. It was basically JIT-compiled C code.
Java isn’t the problem. “Java best practices” are the problem. It’s a culture thing. Likewise, can write heavily OOP code in C if you really put your mind to it and write your own struct full of function pointers. But it’s not in culture of the C community to overuse that design.
You can write spaghetti in any language or paradigm. People will go overboard on DRY while ignoring that inheritance is more or less just a mechanism for achieving DRY for methods and fields.
FP wizards can easily turn your codebase into a complex organism that is just as “impenetrable” as OOP. But as you say, fads are fads are fads, and OOP was the previous fad so it behooves anyone who wants to look “up to date” to be performative about how they know better.
Personally I think it’s obvious that anyone passing around structs that contain data and functions that act on that data is the same concept as passing around objects. I expect you can even base a trait off of another trait in Rust.
But don’t dare call it what it actually is, because this industry really is as petulant as you describe.