Ten Things I Hate About Object-Oriented Programming
Apparently I’m not the only one. In the immortal words of Edsger Dijkstra: “Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.”
Well, I’m not normally one to complain, but I think it is time to step back and take a serious look at what is wrong with OOP. In this spirit, I have prepared a modest list of Ten Things I Hate About Object-Oriented Programming.
What is the object-oriented paradigm anyway? Can we get a straight story on this? I have heard so many different versions of this that I really don’t know myself what it is.
If we go back to the origins of Smalltalk, we encounter the mantra, “Everything is an object”. Except variables. And packages. And primitives. And numbers and classes are also not really objects, and so on. Clearly “Everything is an object” cannot be the essence of the paradigm.
What is fundamental to OOP? Peter Wegner once proposed that objects + classes + inheritance were essential to object-oriented languages. Every programming language, however, supports these features differently, and they may not even support them as built-in features at all, so that is also clearly not the paradigm of OOP.
