Programming

My issue isn't any particular language but the advocates of various languages treating their language as the best hammer for every nail.

You down with OOP? 🤪

OOP definitely doesn't get to claim static types for only itself either. Fuck that.

Yeah let’s not forget the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) which was more full-featured of an object-oriented language than most “current” languages.

The dynamism allowed both Smalltalk and CLOS to avoid a dark corner that will confound your typical OOP’er today - the circle/ellipse modeling problem; they allow an object to “become” a different type on its own accord. Take that, Java!

Why is the word factory a code smell?

I've realized that Factories are actually kind of fine, in particular when contexualized as being the equivalent of partials from the world of functionals.

It's enterprise design that sucks, often it's written in Java - Hello World

Inheritance is isn’t always a terrible choice. But it is a terrible choice often enough that we need to warn the next generation.

But also, when it is not a terrible choice for a problem it is often not the best choice or at the very least equally good as other options that work in vastly more cases.

If we’re looking at it from a Rust angle anyway, I think there’s a second reason that OOP often becomes messy, but less so in Rust: Unlimited interior mutability. Rust’s borrow checker may be annoying at times, but it forces you to think about ownership and prevents you from stuffing statefulness where it shouldn’t be.

That's a take I can agree with. My experience is that composition solves much of what inheritance is intended to solve and ends up being a more maintainable solution a majority of the time.

This is something that’s difficult to demonstrate with small toy examples, which gives OOP languages an unfair disadvantage.

This is well said. It's such a frustrating meme when I see people talk about how many lines a "hello world" application needs as if that's the benchmark of what makes a language good.

This is something often repeated by OOP people but that doesn't actually hold up in practice. Maintainability comes from true separation of concerns, which OOP is really bad at because it encourages implicit, invisible, stateful manipulation across disparate parts of a codebase.

I work on a Haskell codebase in production of half a million lines of Haskell supported by 11 developers including myself, and the codebase is rapidly expanding with new features. This would be incredibly difficult in an OOP language. It's very challenging to read unfamiliar code in an OOP language and quickly understand what it's doing; there's so much implicit behavior that you have to track down before any of it makes sense. It is far, far easier to reason about a program when the bulk of it is comprised of pure functions taking in some input and producing some output. There's a reason that pure functions are the textbook example of testable code, and that reason is because they are much easier to understand. Code that's easier to understand is code that's easier to maintain.

But how does the alternative solutions compare with regards to maintainability?

Which alternative solutions are you thinking of, and have you tried them?

Rust has been mentioned several times in the thread already, but Go also prohibits "standard" OOP in the sense that structs don't have inheritance. So have you used either Rust or Go on a large project?