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Where Object Orientation Went Wrong
Some thoughts on OOP

4 December 2012

by Huw Collingbourne

These days if a programming language ain’t got that OOP, it ain’t worth a thing. Well, anyway, that’s how it sometimes seems.



When I started programming, back in the early ‘80s, hardly anyone had even heard of OOP (Object Oriented Programming). When ‘Byte’ magazine published a “Smalltalk special issue” in 1981, the writers had to explain not only what object orientation was but also how a graphical user interface worked (most computers had text-based displays). They even had to give an explanation of a weird little pointing device called a ‘mouse’ which was bafflingly strange to most readers.

Now OOP languages are everywhere: C++, Object Pascal, Objective-C, Java, ActionScript, C#, Ruby and so on...

And do all these OOP languages make programmers more productive? Do they make programs simpler, clearer and more elegant? The simple answer is: No, they do not.

I’ve written an article all about OOP, the theory and the reality over on the Udemy Blog. [Read On...]