Re: What is wrong with OO ?

[Tansel Ersavas <tansel@deep.net>]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> Tansel says
> 
> "First of all, my opinion is, developing systems with procedure oriented
> techniques is a dangerous, wasteful and unproductive process."
> 
> It is this kind of unsupporable hyperbole that gives OO a bad name!

Unsupportable? Hyperbole? Are we mentioning about the software gap, or
failed projects, or wasted money?
Why don't you look at statistics about these?

Turning a blind eye on Today's problems will not get us anywhere. First
of all, we should admit that we have a problem, then find a solution to
it. We ALL contribute to lost billions by ignoring what's happening
around us. 

> Why is it that when anyone comes along with new techniques that represent
> a useful incremental advance in our knowledge in this area (e.g.
> functional programming, proof of correctness, your-favorite-fad-here)
> they feel compelled to hype them like this with the approach

OO is not an incremental advance. It has started and continued that way,
because SIMULA was an extension to Algol, and some of the most dominant
languages are extensions of procedure oriented languages. This does more
harm than good to OO. Many professionals I have talked to told me that
until they made a switch ( or some of them call it a "click") they
weren't able to benefit from OO a lot. It is more difficult to have that
"click" if we have to work in an environment and a language which is
basically an OO extension to a procedural background. 
It is true that every newcomer announces that it is a significant
advancement over procedure orientation. This is because people are
worried about the current paradigm, and they in search for a better one. 

> "what we have done before is an unmitigated disaster, but my new technique
> will make a revolutionary difference".

These are not my words

> The trouble with such hype is that inevitably it does not deliver, and then
> there is a danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater and
> discarding what is useful along with the hype.

OO as is now, is a struggling, and not much appreciated figure around.
It has its troubles, but they are slowly being ironed out. Yes, there
may be a short term backlash against OO, it may even go back a couple of
years. This is not important. It will come back, and will eventually
dominate.  

> The fact of the matter is that there is NO giant shift of paradigm involved
> here, despite what anyone says. Just look at the OO programs that people
> produce. They are not radically different from conventional procedural
> programs, and one would not expect them to be.

Unfortunately, many OO programs that people produce are produced by
people who are learning. They will be better and better, the gap will be
larger and larger, and differences will be more and more obvious.

People have short memories. A very similar sort of discussion with
similar tones was done when first high level languages were introduced.
Proponents of machine code and assembly languages said, this new
paradigm was nothing new, just a bigger, bulkier way of doing the same
thing with speed penalties, it was not practical, people would never
program with them in masses, etc, etc. Now we see everything has settled
down, there are still people write code in assembly and nothing else,
however they are the minority.

Same things will happen with object orientation. It is a big paradigm
shift even if you deny it. The current object orientation that we use is
a layer on top of procedure oriented architectures. That may fool some
people into thinking that OO is an incremental advance. It is not. The
real benefits of OO will come when the underlying architecture supports
it. Then, a new breed of object oriented OSs, languages and tools will
emerge, and procedure orientation will shrink into minority. 

> OO techniques are a useful way of extending the conceptual design domain,
> and OO features in programming languages allow added flexibility in
> the solution space. Good! But trying to fit everything into the OO mold
> is as reasonable as believing these ads on TV that suggest that all your
> handy-man's problems at home can be solved with one amazing tool!

So far, we benefited marginally by molding everything into procedure
oriented paradigm even if it did not naturally fit into it. In fact we
tried to use one amazing tool called procedure oriented paradigm for
every one of our problems. I admire what we achieved with it because it
requires much greater talent and effort than molding everthing into an
OO paradigm. But this extra effort and talent can be used somewhere else
if we can embrace methodologies which teach us ways of easier and more
economical ways of doing it.

Kind Regards
Tansel
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