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In the August edition of Byte magazine in 1981, David Robson opens his article, which became the introduction of Object-Oriented Software Systems for many, by admitting upwardly front that information technology is a departure from what many familiar with imperative, top-down programming are used to.

"Many people who take no thought how a reckoner works detect the idea of object-oriented programming quite natural. In contrast, many people who accept feel with computers initially think at that place is something strange about object oriented systems."

It is fair to say that, generations subsequently, the idea of organizing your code into larger meaningful objects that model the parts of your problem continues to puzzle programmers. If they are used to elevation-downward programming or functional programming, which treats elements of code as precise mathematical functions, it takes some getting used to. Afterwards an initial hype period had promised improvements for modularising and organising large codebases, the idea was over applied. With OOP being followed by OOA (object-oriented assay) and OOD (object-oriented pattern) it soon felt like everything you did in software had to exist cleaved down to objects and their relationships to each other. So the critics arrived on the scene, some of them quite disappointed.

Some claimed that under OOP writing tests is harder and it requires extra care to refactor. In that location is the overhead when reusing code that the creator of Erlang famously described as a case when you wanted a banana only you got a gorilla holding the banana. Everything comes with an implicit, inescapable environment.

Other ways of describing this new manner of solving problems include the illustration betwixt an imperative developer as "a cook or a pharmacist, following recipes and formulas to achieve a desired result" and the object oriented developer as "a greek philosopher or 19th century naturalist concerned with the proper taxonomy and description of the creatures and places of the programming world."

Was the success just a coincidence?

OOP is still i of the dominant paradigms correct now. Only that might be due to the success of languages who happen to be OOP.  Coffee, C++ and Kotlin dominion mobile for Android and Swift and Objective-C for iOS then you can't develop software for mobile unless you empathize the object-oriented approach. For the spider web, information technology'due south JavaScript, Python, PHP and Carmine.

Asking why then many widely-used languages are OOP might be mixing up cause and effect. Richard Feldman argues in his talk that it might just exist coincidence. C++ was adult in the early 1980s by Bjarne Stroustrup, initially every bit a set of extensions to the C programming language. Building on C , C++ added object orientation only Feldman argues it became pop for the overall upgrade from C including  type-condom and added support for automatic resource management, generic programming, and exception handling, among other features.

So Java wanted to appeal to C++ programmers and doubled down on the OOP office. Ultimately, Sun Microsystems wanted to echo the C++ play a trick on by aiming for greatest familiarity for developers adopting Coffee.

Millions of developers quickly moved to Java due to its exclusive integration in web browsers at the fourth dimension. Seen this way, OOP seems to only exist hitching a ride, rather than driving the success.

What tin OOP do that is unique to it?

There are some valuable aspects to OOP, some of which continue it omnipresent even when it has its drawbacks. Let'southward look at the cornerstones of OOP.

Encapsulation. This means that data is generally hidden from other parts of a language—placed in a capsule, if you lot will. OOP encapsulates information past default; objects contain both the data and the methods that affect that data, and adept OOP practice means you provide getter and setter methods to control admission to that data. This protects mutable information from being changed willy nilly, and makes awarding data safer.

Supposedly, it is ane of the greatest benefits of OOP. Fifty-fifty though information technology is most commonly associated with object-oriented programming, the concept itself is in fact separate from it and can be implemented without using objects. Abstraction is a complementary concept to encapsulation hither; where encapsulation hides internal information, abstraction provides an easier-to-use public interface to data. In any case, it is not uniquely a OOP feature and can be done with modules isolating a arrangement function or a set of data and operations on those data inside a module.

Inheritance. Because objects tin can be created equally subtypes of other objects, they tin inherit variables and methods from those objects. This allows objects to support operations defined by inductive types without having to provide their own definition. The goal is to not repeat yourself—multiple uses of the same lawmaking is difficult to maintain. But functional programming can also accomplish DRY through reusable functions. Aforementioned goes for retentivity efficiency. Fifty-fifty though inheritance does contribute to that, and then does the concept of closures in FP.

While inheritance is a OOP specific thought, some argue its benefits can be amend achieved past limerick. If y'all lose inheritance, objects and methods quickly deliquesce as the syntactic sugar for structs and procedures they are. Note that: Inheritance is too necessary to permit polymorphism, which we talk over below.

Polymorphism. Literally, shape-irresolute, this concept allows 1 object or method, whether it's a generic, an interface, or a regular object, to serve as the template for other objects and methods. There are many forms of polymorphism. A single function can be overloaded, shape-shift and adjust to whichever course information technology's in. Object oriented programming tends to use a lot of subtyping polymorphism and advertising-hoc polymorphism, simply again, this is not a concept limited to OOP.

Seems like in 2020, at that place is not then much that OOP tin do that other programming paradigms cannot, and a good programmer will use strategies from multiple paradigms together in the battle confronting complexity. For instance, if you expect at the tags most often appearing in relation to a question tagged nether OOP vs functional programming, JavaScript pops upward in both.

What'south to come?

OOP has, however, been wildly successful. It may be that this success is a consequence of a massive manufacture that supports and is supported by OOP.

And then what about the developers themselves? Our Programmer Survey this year shows that they are gaining more and more purchasing influence. Well, if we besides look at what developers prefer to piece of work with, Haskell and Scala are among the most loved programming languages. Scala gets you lot the second highest salary. So peradventure with more than FP evangelism, they will climb the list of most popular languages, besides.

There is some movement though, big companies like Twitter are running their backend almost entirely on Scala code. Facebook who has been recently applying Haskell and many of the major OOP languages are also adopting functional features. .Internet has LINQ and Java 8 introduced Lambdas. JavaScript is increasingly functional despite the introduction of classes in ES6. Swift may be the happy medium between an object-oriented and a functional language. So maybe in that location's no need to cull: you tin have your grade Cake and EatCake() it likewise.

Special thanks to Ryan, whose great insights and edits helped with this postal service.

Tags: functional programming, object oriented programming, oop

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Source: https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/09/02/if-everyone-hates-it-why-is-oop-still-so-widely-spread/

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