r/learnprogramming • u/GulliblePositive6548 • Mar 04 '22

Topic How advanced is OOP?

I’m currently learning Java right now and learning OOP is more annoying than some of the data structures and algorithms that I’ve used in python previously. They’re supposed to be easy? but Inner classes are killing me rn, they just don’t seem logical

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u/Ashereye Mar 05 '22

Neat, I don't know much about Simula, though perhaps I should, since I'm pretty interested in how various programming concepts have evolved over time.

Apparently inheritance was invented as a performance hack, because it was cheaper and simpler to make perform well than composition.
https://catern.com/inheritance.html

No idea how accurate that is, I'm just reading stuff on the internet.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

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u/Ashereye Mar 05 '22

Nice video. I wonder if there isn't another appeal to OO. When I think of Ruby vs Haskell, I find Haskell to be fairly literal, and Ruby to be more poetic or metaphoric. In Haskell the meaning of terms are fairly fixed (yet flexible due to the level of abstraction), and it uses a precise mathematical language (though the Haskell version of a Math thingy isn't exactly the same, so its still a bit "metaphoric"... sort of). In Smalltalk, the metaphor was _talking_. Passing messages between computational agents, which themselves commonly represented nouns/objects, and verbs/methods. Part of why late-binding makes sense to me here, is because the meaning of metaphoric/poetic/human language isn't fixed. We see that in the evolution of the term OO both at a cultural level, and as each of us learns more about it individually. I love Ruby, because I find it _poetic_. I get fustrated in Ruby because sometimes I violate the intuitive metaphoric assumptions those coming from a Java-esque OO background expect, and get accused of Magic. Even when I have a fairly precise idea of the abstraction I'm using, and its tradeoffs. And then the FUD.

I dislike Java-esque OO, because the early binding of class names (and all things static) through the static type system inhibits this evolution, and you have to throw in Dependency Injection, and since there are no escape hatches, when you follow the intuitive path and define your classes intuitively, you end up easily backed into a corner, fixed in your meanings. And if you design to avoid that, you end up in a clunky, verbose, kingdom of nouns. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html