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OOP is not that bad
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this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Programming
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As a life-long developer in OOP languages (C++, Java, C#, among others) I still think OOP is quite good when used with discipline. And it pains me that there is so much misunderstood hate towards it nowdays.
Most often novice programmers try to abuse the inheritence for inpropper avoiding of duplicate code, and write themself into a horrible sphagetti of dependencies. So having a good base or design beforehand helps a lot. But building the code out of logical units with fenced responisbilities is in my opinion a good way to structure code.
Currently I'm doing a (hobby) project in Rust to get some feeling for it. And I have a hard time to wrap my mind around some design choices in the language that would have been very easily solved with a more OOP like structure. Without sacrificing the safety guarantees. But I think they've deliberatly avoided going in that direction. Ofcourse, my understanding of Rust is far from complete so it is probably that I missed some nuance.. But still I wonder. It is a good learning experience though, a new way to look at things.
The article was not very readable on mobile for me but the examples seemed a bit contrived..
I think a lot of people conflate OOP and inheritance to mean the same thing. And inheritance is what should get the bad rap. It does not solve any problem I have seen any better than other language features (in particular interfaces/traits can solve a lot of the same problems) but inheritance causes far more problems overall.
This is encapsulation, which is one of the better ideas from OOP languages. Though also not unique to them.
What design choices would those be? And how would they better fit into an OOP like structure? Note that rust is not anti OOP - it uses OOP techniques a lot throughout the code base. It just lack inheritance and replaces that with other IMO better features.
Interfaces, APIs, mincroservices, the unix philosophy...
Curious to hear what in Rust could be more easily solved with OOP! I think one reason for rust not using OOP is because they want to minimize dynamic dispatch and keep it explicit where it happens, because it's a language that gives you very fine grained control of resource usage, kinda similar to how you have to be explicit about copying for most types. Most trait calls are static dispatch unless you have a
Box::<dyn SomeTrait>IMO rust does use OOP styles all over the place. OOP does not mean dynamic dispatch or inheritance - that is just what older popular languages used. Note that static dispatch and monomorphization (where the compiler generates a method for each type at compile time rather than using a runtime lookup) give you a lot of the benefits of dynamic dispatch at the cost of binary size in favor of runtime checks and performance.
And other aspects of OOP, like encapsulation, data abstractions and polymorphism are easily achievable in rust and often are. Just look at any object from the std library - they are all essentially written in an OOP style. Such as Vec or File - hidden internal state with traits that you can swap them around with other parts that make sense. The only thing it really likes - like Go lang (which claims to be an OOP style language) is inheritance.
And the only reason rust is not seen as or describes itself as an OOP language is because it does not force the OOP style on you. But instead lets you program in more of a functional or procedural style if you want to. You can pick the best methodology to solve the problem you have at hand rather than trying to fir everything into a single style.
But that does not make it bad at OOP style.
I'm using "OOP" more in the sense that is described in the article, but that is a fair perspective on rust and OOP. It is a term with a lot of different interpretations after all.