this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming
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Oop is overrated
I never can understand classes
So... "thing I don't understand is overrated"?
I understand OOP. I like it. I also took my first coding classes in the late 90s and we were taught OOP as though it was the last coding paradigm that would ever be needed. It really set me back because I didn't even understand the principles of the functional paradigm until I was already at my first coding gig
Wow, nice hot take!
I find the concept super intuitive, like a blueprint or a mold.
It's intuitive until you realise that not everything fits in a single inheritance hierarchy.
This gives a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfMtDGfHWpA
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I think of OOP as encapsulation, abstraction, and polymorphism primarily. Inheritance is definitely taught as part of it, but it seems like most people have found that to be the least used part of it.
It seems like you understand oop, but find it overrated, from your post it sounded like you didn't understand it -- but maybe you meant you didn't understand it's popularity.
I absolutely understand OOP, its explosion took over everything that took a long time to recover from.
The problem with OOP is that it's pushed as a cure-all both by teachers who do not the problems it solves and also do not understand its own limitations.
In almost every situation where OOP makes sense, something else makes more sense to use.
I may not love oop, but it is extremely useful in the cases that you should use it
Often it's just a container for a bunch of related functions and common state variables for all those functions.
Rarely are classes actually used in the OOP way, where you then create many instances of that class...
Agreed. Inheritance, specifically, is a huge code smell.
When inheritance is acting as a quick way to implement an interface, it's lovely.
When an object is acting as a fancy dictionary, it's lovely.
When a class has more than one parent in it's chain of inheritance (upwards or sideways), that's a code smell.
It specifically tells us that the developers are trying to manage program state (variables and data) that simply should have been refactored out (or have drifted very far from the code they're actually needed by).
OOP isn't classes though but I get what your saying.
OOP is classes, and their accompanying language features (primarily inheritance) and design patterns (e.g. factories).