OO is getting old and tired. But is it dead yet?

Here are a few thoughts inspired by an excellent presentation with a provocative title “Object-Orientation is Dead, too” by Dave Thomas aka @pragdave.

OO has been taken to mean classes, inheritance and polymorphism, as implemented in a variety of programming languages. As we typically build code, the proper class design is to commingle state and behavior. Inheritance provides a simple way to vary some but not all aspects of behavior on connected objects. And polymorphism provides a way to package different behaviors into look-alike syntax.

Together, these features make for an incredibly flexible system, with many different ways to design abstractions, express dependencies, and store state in many objects across the codebase. Other words for flexible are ‘complex’ and ‘complicated’. The notion that having all this flexibility is good and powerful and smart encourages mixing a variety of abstractions and implementations, and long and wide dependency trees. As systems and corresponding codebases grow over time, accumulating ideas and approaches from many people, they grow more fragile, more tightly-wound. Code also becomes more dependent on the past history, rather than the latest, and therefore best, understanding.   

We know all that because OO had had a great run in the last 25+ years. Java, in particular, has been one of the most popular programming languages since it came out in mid-90s, both by the amount of code written and number of people writing in it. .Net platform is heavily OO and is very popular as well. C++, while not exactly a strictly OO programming tool, is frequently used for OO-style development. Lots of complicated projects have been attempted, and plenty completed, using the OO paradigm. Many people joined the ranks of OO developers, people with varying amounts of education, imagination and cleverness.

In the last quarter century OO paradigm has been applied to many complicated development projects, at times by less-than-stellar developers, and often by diverse groups working independently and inconsistently. OOP came out somewhat scathed, bruised by the many broken abstractions, blemished by millions of lines of legacy code, but by and large OO has delivered on its promise to provide a way to make large and complex systems possible.

So, is OO dead yet? Or, rather, are we ready to move on to something newer and better?

It’s been many decades since OO first showed up, handily won over then-popular procedural programming style, and far eclipsed the popularity of the functional approach. We are now older, wiser, and have more experience. Is OO still the silver bullet it has once been? And what are our options?

Functional languages are powerful, deeply loved by their communities, and offer a paradigm that can rival OO tools in solving complex problems. Yet, the functional approach has not enjoyed nearly as wide an adoption among broader development community. It also did not have such a testing 25+ years, as software projects grew larger, more complex, and continuously involved larger numbers of less skilled people than ever before.

The functional paradigm is worth exploring again, with the experience we did not have back when OOP originally came along and took over the software industry. But the winning paradigm for the next quarter century is far from certain.