Programming is easy; thinking is hard. There have been a number of programming articles recently talking about the “failure of object-oriented programming.” In general, these seem to come down to either:
— OOP is a failure because I do functional programming and its cooler; or,
— I tried OOP and my 100-line scripts are simpler written as top-to-bottom scripts.
So I was reading Jeffrey Bakker’s article:
He’s put his finger on something here. As Kipling said, “There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right!” Being a functional programmer, or an object-oriented programmer, or an old-fashioned functional-decomposition programmer doesn’t matter.
What matters is being a thoughtful programmer who knows the tools and chooses the tools based on thinking about what one wants to accomplish. It’s completely possible to write clear, well-structured, SOLID, object-oriented, functional code in any language, from hairy old x86 assembler to esoteric languages like Oz in the Mozart environment.
It’s easier in some of these but that’s an accident of the environment. Thinking out the problem is the real key.
