Object-Oriented Programming — The Trillion Dollar Disaster (original) (raw)

Why it’s time to move on from OOP

OOP is considered by many to be the crown jewel of computer science. The ultimate solution to code organization. The end to all our problems. The only true way to write our programs. Bestowed upon us by the one true God of programming himself…

Until…it’s not, and people start succumbing under the weight of abstractions, and the complex graph of promiscuously shared mutable objects. Precious time and brainpower are being spent thinking about “abstractions” and “design patterns” instead of solving real-world problems.

Many people have criticized Object-Oriented Programming, including very prominent software engineers. Heck, even the inventor of OOP himself is a well-known critic of modern OOP!

The ultimate goal of every software developer should be to write reliable code. Nothing else matters if the code is buggy and unreliable. And what is the best way to write code that is reliable? Simplicity. Simplicity is the opposite of complexity. Therefore our first and foremost responsibility as software developers should be to reduce code complexity.