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cutleryesterday at 2:16 AM4 repliesview on HN

OOP is an industry of its own which generates a ton of incidental complexity. See "Object-Oriented Programming is Bad" by Brian Wills (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM) and most of Rich Hickey's excellent videos, especially his keynote at Rails Conf 2012 where he basically told the Ruby crowd they're doing it wrong (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0).


Replies

chipdartyesterday at 6:55 AM

> OOP is an industry of its own which generates a ton of incidental complexity.

I think you're confusing "OOP is used in projects and I've seen accidental complexity in projects" with "OOP generates accidental complexity".

The truth of the matter is that developers create complexity. It just so happens that the vast majority use OOP.

I challenge you to a) start by stating what you think OOP is, b) present any approach that does not use OOP and does not end up with the same problems, if not worse.

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lelanthranyesterday at 5:41 AM

> OOP is an industry of its own which generates a ton of incidental complexity.

And that "ton" is still miniscule compared to front-end development which almost completely eschews OOP and has 10x more incidental complexity.

I guess my point is that, while OOP's incidental complexity is large, it's still insignificant compared to other technology stacks which developers are showing a great appetite for anyway. Things like "incidental complexity" is irrelevant to developers anyway, today, at the tail end of 2024.

IOW, OOP introduces significantly less $BAD_THING, when the clear majority of developers don't even care about the quantity of $BAD_THING in the first place, making the whole "should we use OOP" argument moot.

Doesn't matter if you use it or not, the extra introduced incidental complexity is still going to be insignificant due to the complexity load of the entire project, more so in front-end.

Hence, there's no point in having the argument in the first place.

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kolja005yesterday at 7:20 AM

As it pertains to Python in particular I think OOP is great for libraries but of limited usefulness at the application layer. Things like pytorch's nn.module IMO is a great abstraction, but every time I've tried to map some concrete business concept to an OOP construct I've regretted it.

ejflickyesterday at 4:13 AM

> OOP is an industry of its own which generates a ton of incidental complexity.

Code in any form can generate a ton of incidental complexity. The issue isn't the tool rather than the education to properly wield those tools. Especially when you introduce the team dynamic where everyone has varying understandings of what is being built and how it should be built.