It's just another way to say the set of all languages is distinct from the empty set. Every language has it's flaws and so there will be complaints about every language. Even if there was a perfect language people would still have different opinions on it. So basically what you posted is a true statement with no use.
that is because Brian Will understands OOP. to criticize something you first have to understand it. and if you believe he know OOP better than most of us and also procedural, why is there so much disbelieve in his statement that procedural is better? the way Java does OOP is just a special case of procedural programming. it forbids a lot and what it does not is called OOP in Java.
Yes, and for yet another level of irony, this was at least as boring and confusing as are the tutorial lessons and especially those advocat-preaching speeches of OOP. Well, literally couldn't agree more - only the limits of understanding make barrier for agreeing. This proves that to the limit of understanding and beyond, OOP sucks!
At company after company I have dealt with confusing messes of deep inheritance hierarchies, sometimes 10-15 levels deep, where each subclass adds just a couple of lines of code. The prime consideration was keeping the classification pure in a philosophical way, like we were inventorying the animal kingdom. A good portion of the developer efforts were targeted towards dealing with the structure of these classifications and not getting any actual features done. Factories that make factories. Singletons with pages of boilerplate to do one simple thing, no object ever necessary in the first place.
Spot on. Anyone who writes lots of JavaScript, Python, Ruby or Go and then dips into the C# or Java world knows exactly what this nonsense feels like. It's developers scratching their own itches of systems level thinking, trying to create the ultimate "system" to solve code complexity. Like a mini-game where they're trying to create an encyclopedia for the world. But by trying to systemamitize away complexity they create even more of it. Now you need your devs to understand dozens of different "design patterns" that supposedly decouple your program and make the codebase easier to work with. Why then are they so complex, require constant abstract thinking and make the codebase even more complicated to work with? Why does every design pattern come with the disclaimer that it doesn't actually fully decouple anything and that it's just a different form of coupling? The coupling comes from needing the cross cutting code. There is nothing we can do about that problem other than make it easier to understand for our developers. Creating all sorts of wacky service locators, inversion of control containers, factories, dependency injectors doesn't decouple anything.
Generic interfaces with only one implementation, factories that just pass the value back to the constructor, subjects and observers that only ever get called once, Massive mutators receiving several different strategies do to the same thing an if/else already does. In general web dev, a lot of "problems" we solve are so simple, and well supported by the base features of the language, that any attempt to show off how smart you are by "using patterns" is guaranteed to generate bloat.
I've known some very narcissistic programmers who write this kind of code for huge organizations like banks. Usually they have zero experience outside their language of choice from 15 years ago and think "standards" and "good practices" are gospel. They usually have zero creativity and think things like "you should use DateTime to store a year value because it's made for it" instead of using a bleeping int. That guy built a framework for every single little thing, and thought Microsoft invented marshalling. He literally could not define the term outside the context of the .Net Framework. And big companies paid him well to write overengineered crap. Of course, he constantly bragged about all this amazing stuff he'd learned 'at the top.' 😂
No worry, you have nothing worthy to understand from this video. Better read Gang of 4, Martin Fowler, Robert Martin and other references. His whole argumentation, especially about encapsulation (eg from: 23:04) , is extremely biased and perverse. His arguments are based on object graph examples which are badly designed in first place. If you respect reasonably SOLID and general OOP principles, you should NEVER get that kind of spaghetti object graph in first place. Then the code would be encapsulated already (SRP, DIP, ISP, LSP, demeter law, and so on...). Then you wouldn't need to encapsulate non existing spaghettis such as he's attempting to, to make his point about how "OOP is bad". And about his statement: "Abstraction = simplified complextity; abstract = hard to understand". Well why abstraction simplifies complexity is because we do NOT have to understand what is abstracted if it's abstracted, so again a perverse argument... Furthermore, abstraction is not more related to OOP than to procedural or any other paradigm. "Mistery why industry tends by far toward OOP"... Did you try developping then maintaining complex enterprise applications (changing often) in procedural, compared to OO? That wouldn't be a mistery anymore for you then... "Procedural languages are more polymorphic than OO languages", lol, special mention for that collector one... And the same goes for a lot of his arguments... That guy is a clickbait sophist misleading least experimented people...
@Clément Cazaud Have you seen the guy's video where he breaks down four real OOP examples from proponents of OOP and how they could be rewritten in procedural form? I think one of the examples in that video was from Uncle Bob (Robert Martin). To be clear, I really respect Uncle Bob and I've bought and read his Clean Code book (his chapters about comments, naming things, and code rot really convinced me to kick some bad habits while programming), but I think the guy's video brings up an interesting point on how one example of Uncle Bob's code being convoluted because it was written in OOP fashion. I'm still relatively new to programming, so my opinion probably isn't really worth much at this point.
The biggest takeaway I get from this, is that this man really, really hates jumping around. He wants to read the function in one place. I can respect it.
Well and I don't want to read the function at all when using it in a smaller context somewhere else, what I don't have to if it is on e well named, well abstracted and I know it's tested.
@@googleuser2016 This exactly. The author of the video would have you believe that readability is just about aesthetics, while in reality it's arguably one of the most important things and we spend a lot more time reading existing code than writing it.
@@s0mbres Could you elaborate on that? I work with (old-ish C-based) rail control systems with dozens of processes and as you can consequently imagine, hundreds of source files and thousands of functions all around. Nothing makes me feel more thankful than coming across a function that doesn't try to do everything. Core dumps are easier to analyze if the stack isn't completely flat, it's easier to set breakpoints, etc.
@@rndszrvaltas It probably depends on how the code is done. Good code would be lots of small functions that do their own thing, they work, and you can ignore the ones that work. A true nightmare would be lots of small functions that are all interlinked in some bizarre way where X relies on Y, Y relies on X, both of them call Z, Z sometimes calls X or Y, etc. It's lots of possible issues and you're never really sure which one is fucking up, so you end up jumping back and forth just to figure out wtf is going on and how it's supposed to work.
As much as I love object-oriented programming, I have to admit that you strike some good points that I haven't considered. After backing up my original code for a particular project, I deleted the whole thing (because it was a mess) and started over from scratch. I will try to implement these principles in that project in hopes of making my code more manageable.
My advice is to write procedural code inside classes and only when it really makes sense use inheritance, interfaces, design patterns and other OO stuff.
@@HumanBeingSpawn Beware, OOP fanboys always gonna try to gaslight you into thinking you are the problem after your code turns into a mess by following their advice.
@@tongobong1 I have started doing this without realizing what I was doing. My inheritance seldom goes much deeper than 2 levels and even then usually only for datatypes
@@MartinSparkes-BadDragon Objects are great for modeling business logic. When you have a domain expert telling you what he wants software to do it is great to represent his knowledge with objects.
Hey, just want to thank you for this video. This explained something really well that I’ve noticed from trying to grapple with existing codebases at work and have intuited as a kind of encumbrance. Chasing classes down gives me a headache - when I want to understand what code does ideally I want it as sequential as is sensible so that I can follow the changes of values and potentially interrogate by pulling values out at different stages. Having classes built on classes built on classes all the way down means that often I get to the functionality I want but then can’t find weird the values get into that piece of functionality in the first place as whilst I’ve followed the hierarchy down one leg I now need to follow it up another! I’m a Data Engineer but have come into it without a degree in any computing field, and many of the things you’ve mentioned in this video I have come to on my own. Such as passing global variables into functions explicitly not just calling them for the sake of it. I totally agree that there is a place for objects/classes for data structures makes sense but not making all functionality Objects. DataFrames are excellent for my work and what they do makes sense, but that doesn’t mean that style of structure makes sense for everything.
right? like there's no silver bullet, there's a lot of these "oop bad functional good" or vice versa bullshit on every forums and it always strikes me as biased. there's soo many different kinds of weird real world problems that one coding style isn't enough.
Seems like too many developers have lost sight of this. The end user doesn't give two shyts about whether you used functional or OOP programming in your coding. They only care that it works...and as long as it does what difference does it make? Code it the way you are comfortable coding it instead of constantly chasing after what's in vogue right now.
Define “the job”. If it’s anything other than “make it work this week and then delete it”, these kinds of discussions are vital to the long term flexibility and maintainability of the code you write.
Transparent “working code” may be working, but it still falls on various spectrums of maintainability, flexibility to change, complexity, performance, etc. I’m tired of people using “different tools for different jobs” as a hand-wavy excuse to use shitty tools just because they feel familiar. Sure, don’t go chasing fads, but it’s worth considering whether programming really IS that difficult, or whether we just make it that way out of ignorance and inertia.
@@drygordspellweaver8761 Nope, employeE. In each of my 20yr past cases, applicants (including myself) were talking to their potential teammates about some tech details. Guess most employeRs actually don't even have a plan what the heck their devs are doing in detail... 😁
My goodness, as a student learning OOP I found the criticism here so relatable. I spent DAYS thinking about how my project could be conceptualized into classes and which methods belong to which type. I decided it was my own lack of OO design experience but I'm so glad to learn I'm not alone and it's never possible to make perfect object-behavior encapsulation in the real world. The "matchmaking game" is absolutely real.
Fellow student here, I see inheritance useful if the main code changes a lot and the clases that inherit do not change. Otherwise, composition is useful. I find it rarely in my programming that I used OOP succesfully, but the idea that I want emphasize is that if this style of codijg is hard to implement, maintain and change for any programmer at any level, it's probably not good. And I haven't even talked about scalability...
I've been in the industry for 20+ years and thought I would share my experience. These are just tools. Imagine 2 handymen arguing that the hammer is THE tool and another claiming a screwdriver is THE tool. They go back and forth pointing out the inadequacies of the other while showing the advantages, elegance, power and more than anything personal aesthetic preference for their preferred tool. Meanwhile the thousand other handymen in town use both tools alongside each other as well as a dozen other tools in their toolbox. Out of the 2 arguing handymen one is certainly more right than the other, though no one is likely to know which. All the other handymen in town know how and when to use specialized tools and they are getting paid the same if not more than the 2 arguing. Learn what you can, try it out, use it when it applies, get paid. School is just one of the tools along the way. There are many problems with the educational system, but that's too much to cover here. What the education systems effectively do is certify you can solve problems and you can see things through. You will learn more about effective design in your first year working than you did in the 4 years to get your undergrad. The learning never stops. Your intuition will continue to develop through your entire career. Listen and extract from these hot takes but please don't take them as gospel. Mostly don't take anything as gospel, just figure out how things are useful. Enjoy your journey.
This is so good. My first C++ job, 20 years ago, was writing code in corporate codebase where a genius code architect had de-crufted a horrible architecture of earlier encapsulation. Nine layers of OOP encapsulation were collapsed into a single layer in an epic refactoring. That happened shortly before I joined the company and I supported both the "old" product and the "new" product. I had started this job fresh out of procedural coding and the excesses of unsupportable "isa" / "hasa" confusions were freshly there on day one. I still like C++, I guess. But this is such a well thought out, battle scarred view. Thank you for this!
The beauty of C++ is that you can practice OOP (classes, encapsulation) etc. where it seems to fit the problem, but not where it doesn't. The problem with Java is *everything* has to be a goddamned object, whether that concept fits the problem or not. Not everything "is-a" object or "has-a" object or "is-a-kind-of" object. Some things just "is".
@@UncaAlbyGmail Except java was, is, and forever will be a million times better than C++. At least in java you can actually code a functional, logical code, whereas in C++ the best you can do is some fibonacci
@@UncaAlbyGmail I still like C++, and having OOP in places saves time. I am not sure I'd like to inherit somebody's codebase who goes through all the mistakes of OOP. I also never warmed to Java.
Your coding style is marxism. Communistic paradigm be like... Every variable, every method public. No private APIs. No borders between namespaces. No inheritance - every variable is common! Get rid of bourgeoisie class. Lines of the code, unite!
@@a0flj0 I find some things from programming outside IT: My favourite example are ads. Ads are nothing other than some unreliable message from some host to us clients. Normal people see products. I see that some outside API tries to change my internal state in suspicious way, so I need to project my thinking, so I will be able to handle this spam. (Sorry for my eng) PS Minutes before writing my previous comment I had watched Zizek xD
A calculator is a very decent program to compare differences between languages, you observed right. You don't need complexity to know the rightness, only how logically sound and consistent it is. A calculator program fills these requirements very well.
@@equinox2584 But you have to limit the input to a certain set of characters, otherwise you can end up with a code-injection vulnerability in your program.
@@badunius_code my first calculator was a graphical calculator made with tkinter, mostly to avoid messing around with eval and hardening against code injection lol
After bouncing off OOP and coding in general and picking things back up, I find myself leaning towards this stuff you're saying, even though I'm not sure I understood all the context myself. I REALLY like that concept of a use x,y demi-function. It scratches an itch I had since the very first time I learned what a function was, and needs a lot less jury-rigging than a modified for loop.
The biggest problem I have with this video is that it completely forgoes one crucial aspect of development - testing. Not having modular components and having "God functions" that do everything in one place makes your software really hard to test, you can't really test individual bits of logic and it will become a nightmare to debug your functions if you need to make even tiny changes. Besides that this obviously introduces a very high barrier of entry for understanding your code, there is so much that a human brain can process and keep track of while reading and grasping the full picture will take much longer than if the same logic was split into separate components, and in many cases the ability for your colleagues to quickly understand what the code does without delving too deep into implementation details is really important, they in general would have other shit to do and spending an hour to understand what a function does is not a good use of their time
Working on large, highly complex projects, I've found the opposite to be true. Human brains struggle with interlocking complexity, not cardinality. We use the functional core imperative shell apporach -- even a non-technical person can open the "shell" procedure, read it top to bottom and understand what it does, hell they might even be able to make minor edits. Uncle Bob-style OOP does the opposite -- it fragments business logic into as many small, individually meaningless units as possible, making it much harder to build out a mental model in your head. Our code practically has a UML sequence diagram built-in, and our engineers love it.
@@dukiwave Its funny because I've also worked on large and complex projects, and modular code with broken down function points is absolutely crucial if you ever want to extend or maintain your code. Having smaller function blocks allows fast isolation to problematic code. Not being able to form a mental model is more of a skill issue and can be overcome with time, code comments and documentations.
create state, create controllers, design gui. besides that you need a state that allows function for your site/app the controls to manipulate it towards the users objective and then the GUI for an end user to manipulate the controllers they have access to.
Functional programming has also its clear limits when you need mutable variables/objects/functionality because that is available only in run time: for instance user interface devices and dynamic inputs/outputs. In this case it is better and easier to code the business with dynamic objects than with monads.
@@user26912 Clojure/FP makes things much slower and trashes memory so you have to ask yourself why are you using multithreading parallelism at all. It's done only for performance and if you waste this on clean code i don't understand. Then write just zero shared data multitasking.
Thank you so much for this. As a programmer from the days of Fortran IV through Pascal, C, Java, JavaScript etc I always felt a bit of a fraud when not writing "proper" object oriented code. I much preferred writing in a procedural way. Now I know why!!! And yes teaching OOP is a real hassle as I'm always thinking, but really I don't need to do this... 😀
I come back to this video a lot. Here's some timestamps: 4:38 Definition of Terms (Procedural, Imperative, Functional) 8:00 Why does OOP dominate the industry? (Java) 15:50 What is the appeal of OOP? 17:18 The One True Way to do OOP (Bandaids) 18:08 What's wrong with OOP (Encapsulation) 20:05 Shared State (Not too different than a global variable) 21:10 Encapsulation requires direct hierarchy (Problems.) 25:41 Premature erected wall building = cool-aide man solutions (OOoooH YeaaaaH!) 26:14 When starting bad structure is worse than an absence of structure 26:44 The mind games of OOP (Unnatural data types, kingdom of nouns, Manager classes) 28:54 Stupid questions you have to ask yourself (Analysis paralysis) 29:52 Abstractions hide complexity (The princess is in another castle) 31:43 Spreading your code out unhelpfully (Increases the surface area of code) 33:19 Solution! Good procedural code: 34:24 What to do about shared state? 34:46 Parameterize! Try not to use globals. 35:15 Bundle globals you do use into a single datatype 35:48 Prefer pure functions 36:19 Use namespaces / packages / modules 37:15 Long functions are fine! Logic in sequence = code in sequence. Use "section comments" 38:55 Use nested functions. (Functions inside a function, so you know it only gets used multiple times there.) 39:50 Constrain scope of local variables (Anonymous functions, use blocks, Jai programming language) 43:32 Conclusion - liberate yourself. For those who enjoyed this, I also recommend talks from Casey Muratori, Jonathan Blow, and David Acton. Thanks for creating this Brian!
I am a mother one of those old timers - started programming back in 1980. That was with an HP calculator with 15 lines of code and 8 memory registers. There were also the ‘optical cards’. You scribble your program onto cards by selecting various numbers, send them off to the mainframe, then a few days later back comes a printout. No keyboards. No monitors, and the printout just as likely to say ‘syntax error on card 3’ as it is to provide any meaningful result. Imagine, A code, run, test cycle measured in days! I have been through almost every ‘revolution’ there has been. Several times. These new fangled technologies come and go out of fashion on roughly a 10 year cycle, just with new TLAs. I have also been responsible for pushing a fair few of them myself as well as resigning myself to ‘here we go again’. One thing to keep in mind is the Turing Machine. Turing proved that all computers, and all languages, are equivalent. Pretty much, once they can do basic logic, then all languages have equal expressive power. Anything you can do in one, you can do in another. So arguments about procedural vs OO vs Functional are moot. I can write an OO compiler using a procedural language and vice-versa. Not efficient, perhaps, but doable. So what it comes down to, as mentioned in this video, are the practicalities. In practice, in a real team, with real people with real business problems and challenges. The efficiency of writing and maintaining the code. The efficiency of new hires getting up to speed and the risks of losing people with ‘the knowledge’. Building a system that is easy to adapt and extend that Ames the users/customers happy. This video singles out ‘excessive OO’ or ‘extreme OO’ as a bad thing - in particular encapsulation. Quell surprise. Excessive anything is a bad thing! For the comp sci students out there, just remember all these technologies are tools. To be successful in a programming career you will need to master a fair few of them. No real world problem, worth solving, can be done well with a single tool. As a wise boss said to me once, ‘this is technology. With the right tool it will go 100 times faster’. This was when I was writing my own ORM layer - not realising there was already a library to do that. Similarly, I once had 85 lines of procedural code replaced with a single line of (damn clever) SQL. Being a programmer is a bit like being a doctor. You can’t solve every problem with a scalpel. You can’t solve every problem with antibiotics. Every person is a bit different. You need years of training and a wide variety of diagnostic as well as preventative as well as curative tools, medicines, machines and hands on experience - book learning alone will not cut it. The main factor for deciding what tools to use is the Problem Domain. One thing I have noticed, time and time again, is that the ‘best’ computer code accurately reflects the Domain it is working in. I guess it is called DDD these days. From that perspective, and getting back to the video, your encapsulation level should reflect the natural encapsulations of the domain you are working in. Though this is more of a heuristic than an absolute rule. Let’s call it ‘Domain Oriented Heuristic’ programming or DOH programming for short. 👍
Shirom Makkad mmm. Well, Domain Driven Design is the thing to search for. Most custom written (let’s say in-house) systems, built to support a specific business, end up with libraries, objects and data models that reflect the nouns and verbs and datasets that the business users use themselves. Encapsulation is also reflected in the various departments and functions of the business. Where this gets really interesting, is dealing with mergers/takeovers and internal re-organisations. Over time, what happens is that the system moves towards an ‘industry standard’ model - particularly as engineers and users are hired and fired between companies but within that industry.
Well said old timer. Just left my own comment on this 45 minute rant. I beat you though. Had to carry my cards to the computer building in a wheelbarrow. Those were the days - not. You still programming?
graham287 yeah - spent quite a few years ‘managing’ and ‘enterprise architecture’ but back to programming now. Mainly Python - which I think is now my favourite language. Mainly because it ‘defaults’ the right way, most of the time and automatically deals with edge cases. So less code.
I just wanna thank you for this video your really validate my frustration, you exactly spotted and revealed clearly the OOP, MVC and Clean Architecture non sense and complexity i have been fighting lately
It really depends on the problem. I programmed the first ever constructed OOP-language in 1970 which was SIMULA and has since then used various OOP-languages including Object Pascal, Java, Javascript, C++ and Ruby. Some problems are really difficult to tackle without objects and for some others objects just distract from the task what you actually want to achieve. Nowadays I mostly use procedural programming but occasionally add in objects for special tasks. It just boils down to common sense when to use it. I agree to that OOP is overused and often just adds confusion when one wants to understand what the code of others actually do.
procedural is not an essay ! COBOL is so damn verbose, is it still ADD X TO VARIABLE or MOVE BlahBlah TO thisOtherVariable ? Everyone else found that Variable += X or variable =variable + x is as informative without screaming in prose.
@@TricoliciSerghei I cut my teeth on SNOBOL. It's not really SNOBOL I wouldn't want to go back to (although frankly I can't remember much that far back) it's the primitive Dec MicroVax hardware I'd rather not go back to. "Hey guys, is the tape deck free?" or "is anyone running anything at the moment?" Glad we're not heading back there!
I've made enough OOP mistakes that much of this resonated with me and wasn't really surprising. But the bigger take-away is much of these same problems apply to microservices. Each microservice couples it's own data storage with the service and they don't share databases. This causes all sorts of problems managing the indirectly-shared state. It is a similar problem, by trying to force a small encapsulation, problems get spread around but not made any easier.
@@Ian-eb2io That is a fundamental concept in microservices. Each service has it's own data store containing all the data it needs to use. The point is to reduce how chatty your system is, rather than call another service for the information, read it from your own data store. This prevents other issues such as deadlocks or infinite recursion. It breaks DRY, but is an intentional duplication.
@@username7763 Are you telling me each services having it's own data store is so that it CAN have access to the data? Otherwise it has to call other services to get the data for it?
As a Software Developer with over 20 years in, having developed in many different languages using multiple methodologies and patterns, this was an interesting presentation, Thank You Brian! The pitfalls you point out and complexities are absolutely real. While I don't think that falling back to the 90's is the answer, as you seem to insinuate, your argument points to something very important, which is too keep architectural and design concerns at the forefront as you write and modify code. "Bolting on" without understanding the design of a program is a fast way to create spaghetti, not matter functional or OO. I find that good program layering and being familiar with Design Patterns is crucial, and helps avoid some if not all of the pitfalls. If I am a doctor doing surgery, I better know how the organs (objects) are laid out and connected (patterns). Just knowing how everything functions is not sufficient in a complex system. As far as Agile goes, that is not a coding "thing", it is a shift in the way we think about building and maintaining things, but should also involve many non-coders in order to correctly set expectations about what gets done when. I will be watching some more of your content. There are some great titles, and you obviously have a lot of real world experience to draw from.
You're right to bet in design and architecture, but it doesn't change the fact that once in implementation you'll face the dilemma for full/partial encapsulation as he mentions around 25:00 - full encapsulation results in lots of additional classes created to help you deal with state (design patterns). Those classes are not related to the problem being solved. They increase complexity because it doesn't make the code any easier to read and leads to poor performance - partial encapsulation results in spaghetti code.
@@visitante-pc5zc you are certainly right. I deal with this in two ways. 1. I'm aware of most standard pattern classes and their functions. They are just part of the world I live in 2. A LOT of those classes are relegated to the framework and work magically.
1) OO was proposed as a solution to problems inherent in functional, top-down design. It was first implemented in languages like Simula (1960s) / Smalltalk (1972), Python (1991). Java wasn’t created until 1996, OO was well established by then. OO was adopted after struggling with many problems in industry, having a long theoretical debate, then doing some experimentation. 2) Brian fails to mention the problems with functional / procedural design. Top level interfaces become very fragile without encapsulation, Iterative development often leads to repeated refactoring of the higher level interfaces. Reuse within programs is common, having every consumer maintain its state for an interface adds complexity and will become unwieldy at scale. It's also simply unnecessary. And no, making the shared state global is not a good solution. 3) Test driven development is not consistent with OO. Test driven development was pretty much a fad imposed by managers. It is just design by interface applied to testing with some other rituals built in, it has more in common with functional design than OO. It suffers from the same shortcomings. 4) Brians biggest mistake is he pitches functional and OO as opposite one another. OO is not about data modeling, or data driven design, or modeling real life objects. The early theoreticians overemphasized the data modeling aspect of OO because they were contrasting it with the prevailing design style at the time, functional design. Had data modeling been popular instead, OO would have been described in terms of designing for behaviors. OO is simply the bundling together of functions and data, with some support for minimizing duplication and access. That ideal balance of functional and data-oriented styles you keep alluding to - that is a good use of OO. OO is also totally compatible with FRP, infact FRP is used alongside objects in most code implementations of FRP. It actually compliments OO very well as it solves most of the state management problems. And FRP is an entirely separate paradigm from functional / procedural programming that dominated in the 60s - 70s. 5) Your object graph is just an undirected mess. You claim the only alternative is a hierarchical structure, this is simply not correct. You can maintain a cyclical object graph and trigger update cycles... you can have mid-level objects that manage lifecycles, and then have an object-graph of them at scale, or a hierarchical structure of them. You can come up with bad designs for anything, this is not a criticism of the paradigm. 6) refactoring code into smaller components is a functional technique, I'm not sure where you got the association with OO. Many functional programmers advocate super-small functions that confuse people ... I've never seen OO designers advocate using tons of super small classes. That's just bad design, the fault of that is on the programmer, not the paradigm. The programmer has to choose the right granularity. 7) Inheritance is used all over the place, there's just a good and bad way to use it. There is not some uniform consensus it should be avoided. When you use inheritance you just have to make sure that the base class won't be torn in different directions. Usually this means using it on smaller components without complex responsibilities. 8) OO is meant for large projects where architectural issues matter. Java was designed specifically for this purpose. If your application is 3000 lines, you might not need OO. You might be able to get away with using global variables at that scale (though if your application grows much larger you're pushing it). In an enterprise scale codebase where you have 10 million lines, no architect would ever design for reliance on global state, this would only result in complete chaos. You exaggerate the flaws of OO without providing a real alternative, and don't address the scalability problems in procedural programs at all, hardly.
I recently ported a PHP web api client into my project without thinking . It has 1300 lines of code, 8 classes 4 files. Pure unadulterated OOP straight out of College... The amount of lines performing the actual function of the application? 8 lines. Which was what was left after i pilfered it for my own use (i had a duh day not knowing php uses CURL library for webapi.)
I would say it is difficult to write large systems that are well structured no matter what language is used. There is always 12 ways to do something and 10 of them are not good choices. Having designed and implemented and programmed in many Common Lisp systems, I've always found everything newer to be worse and disappointing, and it is satisfying that functional+object programming is now finally getting the respect it deserves. Javascript seems the closest to what we had in the 1980's..which is both disturbing and hopeful. I almost wonder if the time is right to bring back Common Lisp, or the simpler subset like NiCL that I created. The last 10 years all I do is write microprocessor apps using C to run in chips that have memory sized in kB. It is refreshing to be able to see the entire app in a few pages of code. I don't think Common Lisp would work in this environment or I would have tried to get it working. I see the chips have gotten big enough that they are running micropython these days...never tried it.
You raise some excellent points. I find this extremely recognizable. Sure OOP and abstraction looks great when you have a simple example that itself is very concrete. But, like you said, real-world problems and programming deal with abstract concepts themselves.
Jerome Potts I mean, this is one of the ONLY videos on RU-vid which explicitly calls out OOP as a bad paradigm. If his assertion is more true than false, then I would say this video is indeed one of the most important programming-related videos on RU-vid right now. If it’s not, then whatever, maybe it’s not that important, and then the pitchforks wouldn’t be necessary... just a thought.
@@ChristopherGray00 I actually just like listening to people talk about how something sucks which I know nothing about. rn I do know what OOP is about and its usecases and use it myself when needed
YES 100% yes. you have managed to expertly put into words my exact frustrations with new coding paradigms and frameworks. I would much rather write functions instead of having weird datatypes and meaningless required declarations strewn all across multiple files that is hard to follow.
Just found this video, found it really informative and I'm glad someone pointed out that OOP isn't some magical methodology you learn and becomes default. From what I found with OOP is that most cases it's either a) Trying to be an overengineered struct, or b) Trying to be an overengineered function (or group of functions). It seems most people use them because it's normally the most advanced thing they learnt and they assume "it's what the real programmers do" (Like a kid mimicking adults). Unless you specifically need inheritance or instancing (e.g., gamedev), FP makes way more sense than OOP
There's been a shift in gamedev away from OOP because objects are slow and hard to multithread in practice and class hierarchies are simply too restrictive to express complex game logic nicely. These days many big titles are built using entity component systems which in many ways mimic relational databases, with every entity being an ID with components like position and health associated with it.
There is a other way of seeing it, and it's fairly simple : OOP is good to learn to learn how to suffer in it and know not to touch it later on, while still learning about UML stuff (which can be transposed in FP)...
I think the video could be more digestible if you didn't sensationalize it with "This is the most important programming video you will ever watch". Not that I am one to talk though.
In reality though the "combination of objects and functional programming" is already the real world way people use OOP and i might argue the standard. The problems with OOP are really just strawman uses of OOP. In the real world, encapsulation and abstraction are only used if it is beneficial, like reducing complexity and improving readability. In school, it's probably the case that everything is over-engineered, but that has educational benefits too. You get to experience the friction that comes with objectifying everything
One hundred percent agree. For example, he introduces a theoretical OOP practice(not sending object references), completely admits that almost nobody follows this practice, and then spends minutes following that explaining why this practice that nobody follows is bad. Well yeah, no shit, thats why nobody does it.
Agreed. Even when in java, a lot of big projects end up having one or several "Tool" static classes which are used as a repository of procedural functions, used with parameters and all that. Because it makes sense, even if it is not ideologically perfect.
If I'm not mistaken, he acknowledged that people don't really program that way, didn't he? Anyways, I don't really care about that point. The thing you said that bothered me was the "school fail upwards by teaching you to do things that way", kind of part. I agree, but I just don't like that reality. Could schools be explicit about this and tell you that full OOP doesn't work? Shouldn't students learn something useful instead of that? If anything, I think we should push back against the literature that pretends that full OOP works.
@@MjolnirFeaw yes, those repositories suck ass, because they are usually strewn all over the code base, and the next guy is just gonna write his own "Helper" function rather than see if something already does the job. They result from not actually working on the architecture.
My first programming language was Fortran IV in 1979. For over 30 years I got paid to write COBOL code. During the time I’ve seen languages and theories come and go. I learned PL/SQL in 1997. As a procedural programmer, switching to OOP drove me nuts for many of the reasons you mentioned. All those factories and patterns made it nearly impossible to find the business logic. I retired and came back to do pl/sql again.
COBOL and Fortran are optimized for a specific area of problems - and inside their area they are fine because they are very limited - it is difficult to write code in COBOL or Fortran which is hard to understand. But imagine you have to implement a graphical user interface having a dynamic number windows containing complex dynamic layouts of widgets of different type (Checkboxes, Radiobuttons, Textedits) using COBOL or Fortran - it would be a nightmare...
reminds me of a time I was on a Java project, one part was an incomprehensible kludge and the developer responsible answered every question with "oh this is the (whizbang) design pattern, refer to (book) if you want to understand it." When I finally dove into the code, I found the synchronisation was completely broken, and that he didn't have a clue about multithreading but always managed to blame the resulting crashes on other things.
"The messages only ever go from parent, to the direct child. Otherwise who is responsible, who is managing that state?" Actually the state can take away the child by legal action if the parent isn't responsible.
As someone relatively new to programming, I appreciate how thoroughly you managed to explain your argument in this video despite all the jargon that was involved. It also taught me more about how and when to use both procedural and OOP, so thank you for that.
+The Foun Neither do I and according to the video it would be a waste of time figuring it out. O well, I don't even program yet. I ordered a book on structured BASIC today. when I am confident in making 3D Games in Basic, I plan to learn C. When I am able to make AI for Arduino in my sleep in C, I plan to learn Varilog. When I am able to synthesis instincts for robotics in Varilog, I plan to learn Assembly. When I can wright a kernel in Assembly, Then I will consider myself a programmer. It all begins with Structured Basic and game programming.
Interesting. I made a total-conversion ARPG mod for an RTS recently and found dealing with class organization to be the key struggle. The code, though powerful in the context of the mod, ended up as spaghetti as anything outside of the object's scope required additional subclasses or types to control things since they didn't necessarily belong to that class, or could exist in one class or another since they shared featurization (in game dev, this is probably a common issue as features are added). For every added layer of complexity I'd wager the effort to make a change increased by 3 to 4x (which is pretty crazy). It starts to make sense why the AAA titles coming out today are a mess, given the size of the stack at play and the corporations fiddling with them. Nightmare fuel.
A lot of games today are entity based, not OOP, so instead of a class for each NPC, the NPCs are just a number, that refers back to a container that has all the data of all NPCs, that is then updated by a "NPC" algorithm. I'm not familiar with those systems but that's the gist of it.
@@MechShark I have no idea, Unity seems to be OOP, but no one in their right mind would write a brand new engine using OOP these days. edit: apparently unity was refactored to an entity system
This was amazing. I have programmed as a hobby for many years but now am pursing a CS degree. I've always had mixed feelings about Oop and you just validated so many concerns and philosophical issues I've had with this.
you're literally at the point where you know that your coal oven is working and now the city tells you "coal is now over we're using natural gas" and you're like "oh but I know my coal oven it works perfectly and I know how much I need to put in it when baking my pie ! I don't want of your gas it's obviously just a new trend that has no advantage"... Seriously mate, don't listen to everything you find on the internet. Oop is fine when you use it properly without overdoing it. It's a skill to develop as much as functional programming. I'm sure you were with same with C struct at the start ! you were like "oh no ! I like putting my data as proper argument I don't see the point of allocating a struct to then give the pointer to my method ! doesn't make sense !". Guess what ... real world has real shitty problem that you answer to with data...
@@CrachOveride57 I appreciate this response, thank you. Sometimes I probably let random RU-vid videos have too much weight on my opinions. This did seem quite thorough, however, and definitely resonated with me. I wouldn't let that stop me from learning OOP and pursuing whatever else I had to to become a proficient programmer though.
You can write bad code in any style. I have been programming for 30 plus years in anything from assembler to lisp, c, java, pyhton, cobol, miranda, basic whatever. The only thing that matters is that you work is tidy, has a consistent strucnture and documents where it has not and communicates it's intention well. The whole OO vs procedural vs functional discussion is irrelevant and frankly feels a bit childish to me. They are just ways of connecting the digital pipework differently. If you are a good programmer you will be flexible and able to recognize logical patterns and structure in any coding style. Or if that is difficult for you, just stick to one and be an ace at it.
Like they say, whatever floats your boat. I, personally prefer procedural programming, but I have nothing against OOP. It has its flaws, yeah, but as long as you can do the job right, tidy and functional, you can do it however you want.
I return to this video periodically, every year or so, as I improve my knowledge of programming concepts, each time I understand it a little bit better :)
Great video! I'm definitely not an expert so this is kind of a beginner view. I love the Subject.Verb methodology, but I work in ultra high level systems like Unity, I feel like I'm coding more maintenance than say, a virtual reality game. Performance is important so I have to cache all possible references. Passing script references is tedious, especially when you need an object references at a physics collision or just want to pass an int to objects within the same heirchy. It becomes spaghetti. I've gotten lazy and passed entire prefabs (objects of objects) as a parameter. I follow the rules loosely based on what needs to be fast (game loop), but lazy where I have some milliseconds to spare (load scene, save file, etc.) Everything else is stupid Private [Serialized Feild], encapsulation, and circular communication. It seems to be more complex and nebulous. It's difficult to read and not really re-usable. Passing a simple bool to an animator becomes tedious. Going the other direction, trying to make a generic projectile script that can support multiple objects leads to a huge class that probably would have been better as 2 or 3 scripts with duplicate code. Like I said, I'm not an expert, but I feel the pain of encapsulate and trying to access so many references.
Your description of modelling real world things with OOP makes me think about a large corporation and all the pointless layers of middle management. Its like we found a way to replicate *that* relationship in our code.
@@yousefabdelmonem3788 Well yeah. Furthermore, those necessary evils are a fundamental problems arising from scale. As the problems become bigger and harder to solve by one person, you need to make bigger and bigger compromises. It's also useful to remember when criticising governments as "less optimal" than corporations. They only have more clutter because they have harder problems to solve. Same goes for big code.
@@ekki1993 No. Thats not a fair comparison with the governments. Some governments dont even use version control for their engineers when they make their software. People dont say governments are less optimal because of their messy solutions, people say governments are less optimal because bad managers are even harder to fire, and bad employees are the only ones that flex their worker rights. Its just inherently bad.
so.. i did get some way into the video. what i found strange is that first you state that oop shouldn't get all the credit for java has done right since a lot of it is not fundamentally about oop but then you go on to criticise oop for some things which are not per se a problem of oop but rather how things are done in best practice. i am currently at 22:17 and you just complained about shared state and how you shouldn't pass references to other objects (although i dont see why this is a problem when done well. sometimes shared state can help coordination of classes). you could just structure your oop code to always just pass copies of your objects like you do in functional programming. anyways, i wish you had used a different intro for your video, as it doesn't suggest that anything of non-subjective nature is going to follow..
Amazing video, I agree ultimately, and this level of decision making took me years to work out and is the real skill developers should be trying to obtain. I think It’s a human thing at the end of the day, people work their whole lives to come up with this stuff and of course they are going to promote that their idea is the best, and of course people will gravitate to what others say is the best. I think we all do that to some extent. It’s a hard thing to be able to abandon a mindset that you’ve worked on for a long time and was convinced was the best, but once you get comfortable doing this, it’s very powerful because you can delve into everything with confidence and as a result you will learn so much! I think there’s value in understanding OO, and maybe even falling into the rabbit hole just slightly, it’s not a bad thing because you will still learn so much, but it’s just having the open mind and accepting there ain’t no actual answer like you say at the end. Don’t fall into the hole too long. This is why I hate devs who argue between specialising and generalising. You will never develop a rounded mindset if you spend your life in one language and way of doing things.
@@ianrust3785 are you okay? Why bother with such comments? I’m assuming your a dev yourself, I’m assuming you’re experienced, I’m assuming you’re a smart guy, and so I’m assuming you understood what I was trying to communicate, what’s your issue?
To those watching this video who are just learning how to code, THE AUTHOR IS MISSING A KEY POINT: OOP is just one of many tools in your tool set, just like several others in the comments here have said. The author is flat out wrong when he says that OOP is completely bad -- there are some types of projects, team sizes, and applications where it might not be a good fit, just like there are MANY projects where the author's style of coding would be an absolute disaster for maintainability. Similarly, when devs say that "OOP is better than functional" or that "functional is better than OOP" they are BOTH wrong -- combine the approaches and use each when they're appropriate for the problem you're solving. Moreover, judging from the comments section on this video, it seems like I am in the minority here, but I haven't ever really had a problem with OOP. In every project, I just get a feel for how things should be abstracted and organized, and everything just flows. There are sometimes moments where I'm not sure where a certain behavior should "live" but it doesn't lead to paralysis -- I just put the behavior where it seems like it makes the most sense and then move the behavior later if I find it's not the best place for it. What's the big deal here? I have 20+ years of experience and the first programming languages I learned were C, Pascal, and JavaScript before moving into PHP and then Java and C# in college. I will say that initially I didn't like how strict Java was compared to PHP, but object-orientedness felt extremely natural and after about a semester I preferred Java's strictness because it made things significantly easier to maintain than procedural C or PHP. Since college, I have written in Ruby, Python, JavaScript ES6, and now quite a bit of C++. I absolutely hated Ruby because it prioritizes aesthetics, individual expressiveness, and brevity over clarity, documentation, and productivity. If you were to ask me today what language and standard library I prefer, it would be Java, then PHP, then C#. The biggest flaw with this video is ironically that it is the epitome of what it's criticizing -- it's TOO ABSTRACT. If the author wanted to make a strong point, they should have demonstrated the advantages of procedural code using one or two decently sized example programs with both OOP and procedural. Instead, the author explains he wants things to be tangible, relatable, and obvious, yet all the criticisms of OOP are only explained in abstract hypotheticals and posed as high-level system messaging designs. Not only do the "solutions" described in the "procedural code" chapter lead to mega-long functions with multiple responsibilities that are hard to test and hard to repurpose beyond the use case that they were written for, but they also don't clearly relate to the messaging challenges that the author set out to address during the discussion of OOP pitfalls. Is OOP perfect? No, but the author's point that because "perfect OOP" isn't possible the whole thing isn't useful just falls flat. I have worked on extremely large projects (including payroll systems and information systems that have hundreds of integrations) as well as small projects, and I have not found the analysis paralysis that the author describes. I have found places where engineers have created a few too many layers of abstraction (usually facades) or places where devs are breaking through the abstraction to get data that should be exposed other ways (usually technical debt in the interest of just getting something working quickly). But... since the advent of dependency injection and coding-to-an-interface, the incedence of both of those things has gone way down. Every project has to balance cleanness of design with performance, and you don't just write this code once -- you're going to iterate on it over time. Smaller, focused code with a single responsibility ages much better than longer code that does multiple things.
"should have demonstrated the advantages of procedural code using one or two decently sized example programs with both OOP and procedural" - cannot agree more!
The man who created this video made two or three follow-up videos where he takes actual OOP codebases and rewrites them in the procedural style. He knows what he’s talking about. I have also been coding for a long time, and the older I get, the more I agree with this video.
Poo-pooing autocomplete as "groping your way through" is a nonsense argument. Programming isn't about memorizing rote syntax, and having that belief is a recipe for disaster in a codebase of any significant size.
Imo a good programmer is the one that comes out with te best and most efficient solution, not the one that memorized all syntax. Autocomplete is a really good tool that improves workflow exponentialy
Absolutely. Especially if you're modifying someone else's code or code you wrote more than a year ago, autocomplete is an absolute lifesaver. This is why it takes me 3 times as long to write JS as Java.... I have to constantly look for function names in other files that were written years ago by other people.
it seems like these "oop critics" have only ever woked on single person small scale applications where they could reinvent the wheel without it taking years - its also proably a very shitty wheel if they just came up with it themselves.
While I agree with most of your arguments, what you've mostly described is just bad programming practice. Procedural programming has its own pitfalls, and an inexperienced coder will turn it into crap just the same.
Gavin Schuette neither is procedural programming. They're just two different ways of abstracting the logic so you don't have to code on the bare metal. Use whichever floats your boat.
That is a sound premise. I've always felt that C++ is one of the better languages out there because it's a Swiss Army Knife of tools. You can write pure OOP or pure Procedural or mix and match. We even have his "use a, b {...}" example in C++ with lambdas. I think it comes down to picking the right tool for the job. Don't make everything a class, and don't make everything a 64 parameter function. Use what fits the situation best, and remember bad programmers will always choose the wrong tool.
@@djpeterson7479 why couldn't they define classes for c++ too and other functionality of other languages so we could have one single language and either use it as oop or make our own universe. Why is that so hard if c++ is as flexible as you describe? Im just asking i dont know nothing about these but whoever gonna respond to this comment just dont be a dumb
This is a long video and pretty interesting but I'm not sure if it covered my main concern with non-object oriented programming which is how do we do a better job of avoiding side effects or just really messed up shared state? I'm wondering if the solution might be to use object oriented programming specifically when it relates to data but not to "responsibilities". For example you can create an object to represent some type of state that manages that state, including an interface for a database. But you should not create classes to do really anything else other than manage state... For example no factory classes, no controller classes, no classes responsible for some portion of functionality such as a servlet, etc etc.
That use idea kinda exists in R, there is a with(x,{}) function, but its not general purpose and moreover is super specific to a certain R data structure. Also R has scope searching rules that will try and find objects in every parent scope. Sooo yeah its not the same at all just a similar idea, which I think is a good one!
This is how I saw scientists program intuitively. I was an experimental physicist before changing to the industry and most programs, I have seen back then, written by physicist followed the functional programming idea. Maybe, because all of us were comming from a mathematical background. Some programs were a mess though and comments were in Portugese, German and English on different layers of code. ... Good memories. And good video.
i knoww XD Procedural coding has its name literally because its how most would learn to code if self guided. i think. usually accurate but not probably not correct.
Well, the quirky thing is that we're doing OOP when deep "in the beast of the machine" it's literally running the code in a sequence vis a vis procedural.
You must understand that every programming paradigm solves those problems, that other paradigms can't solve. And different tasks require different paradigms
I disagree, because cognitive complexity is a real thing. Our human brains can only hold so much in memory at once, so it is our goal to design a software architecture that optimizes for that. I can say definitively from my own experience that giant procedural code I wrote in my early years is far more difficult to read and comprehend. Once you study it for a while it becomes understandable, but only after a while. Code where I broke up into smaller pieces is much faster to read and comprehend, and I make fewer mistakes with code written like this.
Also do not forget that, going into more of a domain driven design paradigm, eventing allows for decoupling when things get too far apart from a domain standpoint. Think about how much UI systems rely on eventing, but often still use OO concepts as well.
Yes, cognitive complexity is a real thing. But OOP does not help with it. All it does is throw the performance aspect out the window so that the problem you are trying to solve is a simpler one. Dumbing things down means you aren't solving the same problem anymore. For a given problem, if you aren't disregarding the codes performance, the problem is necessarily as complex as the problem is. You can't just willy-nilly group things up without affecting how the code runs. When you are trying to solve the more complicated version of the problem (which is not done for nothing, it is useful), thinking in OOP terms will not do anything useful.
Wow. Really well done 💯 I couldn't help but crack up at your point about encapsulation flying out the window once objects are shared. Mainly because how obvious the point is yet I somehow never thought of it that way
I appreciate your insight, this has allowed me to view my code from another perspective. Thank you for taking your time to express and share these ideas.
I'd say MOST good java code is actually written in the style above. The things which are encapsulated in classes tend to be a) various functions which are logically grouped together and b) configuration (which is a bit like global variables as it pointed out in the video ). The reason for this is that most server side codes needs to be entirely re-entrant, so storing state (other than configuration ), is a no no. State ends up in databases (of various forms ). The only exception to this is various caching type functionality.
I had second hand experience with Java web developers back in my early day as a software engineer. I saw way too many static class methods to the point I thought to myself: Are they even doing OOP? Well I was still an OOP fanatic at that time -- my foolish younger self.
The anonymous functions denoted by the “use” keyword exist in C++ lambdas, right down to the explicit list of named function variables that can be shared with the anonymous function.
Is that what a lambda function is? I have been trying to understand lambdas for so long that it's embarrassing. The "use" idea described at 41:40 makes perfect sense to me. Is this all a lambda is?
@@1u8taheb6 Yes that is exactly what a C++ lambda is, it allows you to capture any or all variables from the enclosing scope either as references or values, and also allows you to pass in regular variables like you would to any function, you can combine these options in any way you like, they are very handy.
@@koacado Python Lambdas allow only one expression. Python lambdas are also closured which means they capture the variables of the surrounding scope. The proposed "use"-block should be like an immediately invoked function that is NOT a closure.
I've done a lot of procedural programming back in the early 90's and then switched object oriented programming. For me, OO code is easier to read, quicker to develop and evolve. I do use procedural here and there but if an object is appropriate then I'll use it. I like C++ and Java.
Most of the time objects are not appropriate. The problem with OOP is that it has gone from yet another tool in the toolbox to a forced methodology. It has, Marx forgive me, become the Marxist ideology of programming.
Did you watch the whole video? He isn't advocating against objects. He's advocating against inheritance, polymorphism, instances and strict OOP decoupling. His suggestion was specifically to use objects but not in a dogmatic OOP way.
@@omicronx94 And thus he takes out some of the most important tools in OOP. Without inheritance you won't get the sweet decoupling with dependency injection that is very popular with .Net developers today. Also decoupling isn't bad in fact its very good, when you work with larger programs, you will be very happy that the code is isolated, so when you want to change something, then you will only need to change it in one place and not more. It also really helps to expand your program, by limiting what you need to change. What he is asking for can easily be done with C code, but history has proven him wrong, procedural is inferior to OOP, when one uses OOP correctly, like don't use polymorphism for what is basically a switch case, it should be used when the data structure fits the split into more classes with a common base.
A great video, well worth the few minutes to watch. It certainly removes the guilt about not following the university taught methods of OOP. Our code today is a mix of procedural, functions, and very limited classes. It’s a style we ‘fell into’ after suffering the pain of trying to make OOP work for all applications. This video vindicates are choices and makes them more defensible if code was ever audited.
Minimizing state is something I think a lot of people gradually learn over time. Function side effects make your code difficult to use if your project grows enough, function side effects can just cause an overwhelming amount of bugs.
I really disagree with people saying OOP is bad, but that's mostly because if it weren't for OOP, modding minecraft would be fuckin *impossible*, like holy hell it would suck.
@@hongkyang7107 Moddable because it's small. For bigger size ones like Minecraft it's practically impossible to do with just procedurals and even if you could, you'll need a degree on Minecraft to mod it.
I propose the idea that, in programming, there is no good to be found through inconsistency. Great job, Brian. I was in the business for over 35 years, and when OOP was first announced and I got my first taste of it, my thinking swirled around the realization that in the attempt to add clarity, OOP would add layers of complexity that have nothing to do with code functionality. I'm grateful to hear someone else take OOP apart on this basis. Thank you for this presentation.
I completely agree with this video! I learned structured programming and the issues with objects is figuring out the best design for the objects and inheritance, at the start. OOP code, almost always compiles into bigger code that runs slower.
It drives me nuts that people act like Common Lisp never existed, exclaiming "Oh, why can't I have " when it was available for the past 30+ years. Or worse -- crapping on all that Lisp provided and then embracing it as soon as someone adds curly braces instead of parentheses.
I’ve spent 15 years at a fortune 200 company where we have almost always been writing procedural code in OOP languages, mostly Java. We generally feel shame for it, and occasionally an overachiever builds something with “proper” OOP. Every time it ends up being a mess and more trouble than it’s worth. This has helped me finally see why that has been the case.
@@pyhead9916 I think OC and OP are both under the impression that writing with objects automatically makes you a good programmer. Hopefully this is obviously wrong because a pile of crap is still a pile of crap no matter what angle you look at it. If the object collection has weird hierarchical madness OO is not to blame, uness implemented so poorly in the language itself, but instead simply is a bad programmer/team.
@@Dovenchiko I agree. Yes, using OO doesn't make you make good programs magically. I think the authour is a good programmer, and as good programmer, doesn't really understand the problem of bad programmers. He is always comparing good procedural programs with good oo programs, and he has some really valid points. But the fact is business wants/needs a replaceable workforce and that causes a high rotation, so you are going to have some bad apples sometimes. And OO really excels limiting the amount of damage a bad programmer can do. I think every criticism the author makes about OO is correct, but he doesn't value enough its advantages, especially the management ones, and also dismisses the problems of procedural programming, i think because he is good at it so he can manage that. And finally, no two programmers are equal: some understand better (and consequently, are better at) some paradigms, an some other understand better another paradigms.
@@unformedvoid2223 No tool or technique prevents damage, but modularization makes the damage contained. OO forces that modularity, and that's why it is the popular choice for business. That was what i was pointing out. Remember that the 'best' language can be one from the point of view of the programmer, but another one from the point of view of the business.
Cool video. I've definitely run into the problems you talk about at work but I always just thought "eh whatever I'm stuck with this" and tried to band-aid them as best I can like you discuss lol. The "excessive splitting" problem is particularly relevant, because we have these dogshit code sniffers that complain if any one particular function has too much stuff happening. I find myself needing to split up functions into building blocks that literally don't ever even get used anywhere else besides that one original function anyway, which feels pointless. That being said, I find your solutions to still sort of just be "do OOP better." In my experience anyway, all of your suggestions at 37:30 are things I've read and applied to a programming style that is still OOP at heart, discovered through an essential goal of "I want to do OOP better" - but maybe that's OK? In fact, the entire "Functions" section of the video seems to encapsulate what I just talked about, where a function should be split up in a way that does not make its components any more "widely usable" and instead is just breaking up the big function for readability. Perhaps I missed something, but I still really feel "procedural programming" as you described it is "doing OOP better." Which again I think is fine! But the video title then becomes a bit disingenuous, idk
This year, I took the plunge and decided to write an entire project using just functions and interfaces, in TypeScript. I had to stop and regroup a few times along the way, but the exciting thing is, the stuff I've had to learn along the way really seems more generally applicable - whereas a lot of the OO patterns and principles often seems like (as he says) a workaround or a bandaid. What you learn by committing yourself to this is much more general - simple techniques that work every time, not just for one specific problem or scenario. I have 23 years of developer experience and pushing myself to go all in on this feels like leveling up - for the first time in a long while. I was on the fence about this video in 2016. I knew there was something true to it, but I had no idea where to start. It does have something to do with the language you're using - I was using mainly PHP, where functions and interfaces aren't really practical or useful the way they are in TypeScript. I don't agree with absolutely everything in this video. Part of me wonders if the author hasn't changed his mind about some of the finer points in this video over the years - we all grow and learn, right? I kind of wish he would post an updated version of this presentation. Anyhow, I gave it my like today, 5 years later. 😄
I also don't agree with everything stated, particularly about functional programming. Computers just don't work that way so will never be efficient enough. I was a true believer of OOP as a C++ game programmer for many years. One day a friend suggested I try writing a game engine in C instead of C++. I was skeptical as I loved my fancy C++ systems and templates etc, but in the end I found my code to be much simpler, smaller and more elegant. Unfortunately I still have to work on OOP game engines and nobody will believe me that procedural is better.
I've started coding in a more procedural style i think, but i like to slap most stuff into a class anyway ... just with more emphasis on making many methods pure functions that don't touch the object's properties. And i reduce the object dependencies. I find when my code is hard to test, it's hard to think about, and it's hard to maintain. I also make most stuff public because idk when i might need to mess with things. Idk. I used to put a lot of weight into designing things perfectly for extensibility or whatever & talks like this (and moreso molly rocket) have lead me more toward just ... get it done, clean it up a little bit, and don't worry so much about design. I feel like I'm explaining myself poorly though
"Kernels of good ideas have been taken to holistic extremes." That's a very succinct way of pointing out a bad tendency people exhibit in many areas not just coding. I'm adding that to my "great quotes" list and attributing it to Brian Will.
The more I learn about lower level languages the more I realize structs are mostly what I really need. But since dataclasses are what python has I will use them.
Learn an assembly language. Preferably one with a relatively orthogonal instruction set with regards to addressing modes. Even if it's an essentially dead CPU like 6809 or VAX-11 or PDP-11 (I wouldn't suggest IBM 360/370/390, and especially not the highly idiosyncratic 80x86 family (including the 64bit successors). ARM is probably way more than a beginner can handle (whereas the 6809 only has 256 instruction codes implementing approx 20 instructions with some using a variety of addressing modes, and the PDP-11 ~64 separate instructions with very little restriction on addressing modes (8 logical addressing modes implementing 12 conceptual addressing modes, because the stack pointer and program counter are both general registers, allowing addressing modes which use those registers to be implemented with the same addressing mode already implemented for the other general registers, but having a different semantic meaning), and the VAX-11 implementing 256 instructions, and 16 logical addressing modes implementing approximately 12 logical addressing modes, but by using the same register trick as the PDP-11, implementing about 16 semantic addressing modes). In lieu of 6809 (hard to find), you can learn it's more modern near-equivalents, 68HC11 or 68HC12, which are still in production as microcontrollers that are ALMOST system-on-a-chip. Once you've programmed in assembly, all interpreted and compiled languages are MUCH more comprehensible than beforehand. If you can learn and assembly language, and then write C code, and compile it with a flag specifying to output the assembly code that is passed on to the assembler, you will see what machine code is produced by the C code, especially if the assembly output has the C source code interspersed with the corresponding asssembly (this line of C code produced the following 4 or whatever lines of assembly). Once you get the hang of that, data structures and data classes are much easier to comprehend. AND ESPECIALLY POINTERS!!!!
Funny because I’m cpp classes are basically structs with some functions that manipulates the data in the struct. Then you have the opportunity to declare things public or private. A struct is public by design! Try it in cpp, I have. It works exactly as I described The overuse of classes etc is really poor habits or not understanding imho I have not asked Bjarne about this, but I believe he would say that you should focus on making the thing work, being stable, efficient etc As opposed to try to fit everything into on size fits all. After all cpp contains more than one concept
I went through the whole phase. Disagreeing with Brian Will, Agreeing with Brian Will and finally maturing and Disagreeing with Brian Will. The more I went procedural the more I realised I'm just wasting time doing OOP by hand.
@@macchiato_1881 No, I just found myself manually implementing OOP. I was managing and passing handles and structs around when this is natively given in OOP and it's done in a much safer way. I found myself having to remember all the functions related to specific handles. The real deal breaker for me was finding work around for the lack of interfaces and method chaining.
@@chudchadanstud there's a reason why in C++ you don't need to type this by default and value initializing values as defined by programmer who wrote the type description is a trivial {} and not some bullcrap function call with naming convention no Cnile moron can agree on, especially when time comes to do the opposite and release resources that were potentially allocated, if only we had language features that enabled describing what should be done and compiler would do it at the right moment without us needing to care about all of that... I've seen C projects that use garbage collector because apparently C++ is just too bloated... Last time I tried to use C I found myself reimplementing std::vector and std::string because C has less actually useful features than map of the sun. Not to say that I believe that C++ is OOP or anything, C++ is actually the only sane language in the world that gets out of your way and does as you say, I care about all the potential bugs as much as I care about fishermen hooking themselves or whoever is using a hammer crushing their fingers, it's part of life and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Most programmers are perfectly capable to make a mess of any project without oop, good programmers can make a gem with any style of programming. Must admit that oop can rely boost the clusterfuckery of a project.
I like the name spacing iOOP provides but I don't think you should be hiding internals of an object unless you actually need to. Other developers just hide things by default and cringe when they are forced to add accessors to their private variables. :/ I go the other way around untill I see abuse I'll keep accessors to private variables and remove them if they start being abused.
@@carlosgarza31 when you expose variables or methods they become part of your public API. removing them in big projects later when you discover that people abuse them (probably because you have exposed something you never intended to be used by someone else than you), then you have to mark those variables and methods as deprecated, release a new version and give time (depending on the size of the project or the user base that process might take years), and then finally you can mark them private to hide them again. information hiding is one of the key principles of oop and a powerful tool in the hands of the right programmer.
@Minori Housaki Not necessarily. It's the difference between `queue_push(q, elem)` and `q.push(elem)`, or even `queue.push(q.elem)` if you put your queue handling functions in a module.
I have 35 years of software development experience. OO is a tool. A very effective tool when used correctly but not so much when you slavishly allow it to dictate every little decision you make. Leverage the strengths of OO (like polymorphism, high cohesion, low coupling) but minimize its pedantic usage (like unnecessarily complex inheritance trees for the sake of OO purity). Unless you are using a pure OO language like Smalltalk, most OO languages are flexible enough to be multi-paradigm. It's a poor workmen who blames his tools, unless of course it's VB.
Agree! In my simple understanding. Objects are stateful and most distributed and multithreading approaches assume stateless where data is separated from the handlers. OOP still is a working horse of all internal logic.
OO is a tool, but in language like Java uses OOP all over the places wherever it's not even necessary. New programmer checking the codebase gets confused when OOP used in places when it's not even necessary, with inheritance its just nonsense abstraction.
I might have a go at implementing the "use" keyword in Rust using the macro system, although "use" is already a keyword for importing so it'd have to be called something else. I imagine it would create a function parallel in scope to where it is used and call it immediately. Because Rust macros are evaluated at compile-time I don't think this would show up in documentation, and even if it was there's a way to ignore it that could be inserted by the macro.
This was an absolutely fascinating video. I intended to just watch the start to get a vibe for the idea here and ended up watching the whole thing. I'm a SD student and we are using Java as our teaching language, and I personally am currently trying to square the circle; to extricate the cross-over from encapsulated objects. Something you said in the end about programmers taking good ideas to holistic extremes is something that even someone at my level can appreciate. A lot of the questions I have asked my lecturer, the ones that did not receive "good" answers anyway, relate to this idea. Super interesting video.
Oh, heck yeah. I normally hit the skip hard on lines like "One of the most important yada-yada." There was just enough nuance to promise the goods, and yeah. Maybe not a life-changer, but I'm with you!
Lol... the video just speaks above the audiences heads, where most listening aren't educated / experienced enough to refute the horrible ideas. OO is meant for large projects where architectural issues matter. Java was designed for enterprise-scale applications. It was designed by Sun microsystems specifically for this purpose. If your application is 3000 lines, you might not need OO. You might be able to get away with using global variables at that scale (though if your application grows much larger you're pushing it). In an enterprise scale codebase where you have 10 million lines, no architect would ever design for reliance on global state, this would only result in complete chaos. There would be so many unpredictable synchronization issues it would destroy your application. This has been known since the earliest days of high level languages... Most of the people in these comments agreeing with Brian are students, or people with 1 or 2 years experience, small scale web developers, electrical engineers / other scientists working only with C, for whom programming is not their main specialty... etc. I can guarantee you very few of these people are working at scale, these ideas simply do not work at scale. Which is why they are not used...
@@ianrust3785 Linux is millions and millions lines of code in a procedural style. It has more than half a million contributors and has been maintained for 20+ years. Every AAA game that pushes the boundaries is made in a procedural/data oriented fashion because OOP kills performance. These two examples absolutely dwarf any enterprise app by an order of magnitude in complexity.
@@cavasnel Despite the fact Linux is written in C, the code in the kernel leverages many tricks of the C language to mimic OO. For a detailed description of these various tricks and their use within the Linux kernel google "is linux written in procedural style". Also.... according to The Linux Foundation, since 2005, “some 14,000 individual developers from over 1,300 different companies have contributed to the kernel.”. Most of those contributions are drivers, ... but it's not half a million, sorry.
@@cavasnel Games are typically written with components based architectures these days, most are written with Unity or using various C++ libraries. Try describing a real game and how it was architected in detail. You just claimed the entire game was written in procedural style. What game was designed this way...? And what was the reason - was memory severely limited on the platform for some particular reason? This sort of problem was far more common in the days of 16-bit SNES than it is now. If you’re writing your own custom game engine or image processing functions, some piece of code that executes millions of times for a single update to the UI, then extra layers of abstraction could start to degrade performance. If performance is critical and resources are very limited, eliminating those layers will be one of two dozen optimizations you might do here - because you’re dealing with such a critical piece of code. The entire program would not be coded this way, this engine code will be tucked and the rest of the application will only interact with it through an API. In your main application, the part of the code that is user-input driven (not compute bound), memory management is the only thing that matters. A trip to disk takes about 8 orders of magnitude longer than a compute operation, processing extra layers is a compute operation… eliminating a single call to those layers might amount to a few microseconds worth of difference in performance, maybe. Depends on what’s in the cache. Depending on the compiler, it may actually make no difference whatsoever… To optimize in such a way any user-input driven code is purely idiotic, it is compromising the architecture for microseconds worth of performance. Meanwhile if you need to reuse any code, like an object model or behavior, in the entire game... you have to begin maintaining duplicated or global state for your code, and now you have a giant mess on your hands. I don't doubt some developers have done it, developers do all kinds of stupid things, but this is not a good design by any stretch. A more valid concern is potentially pulling in more from standard libraries than you need, increasing memory consumption, so some developers write their own custom algorithms that reimplement some things from standard libraries... but even this is usually a bad idea, the compiler recognizes & optimizes code in standard libraries, the code actually executes 3-4x faster than custom code. But this isn't a paradigm problem, it just has to do with memory management. Carry onward
For a while I thought I couldn't learn programming because people needlessly overcomplicate it on purpose. After watching this video, I now realize that I can't learn programming because people needlessly overcomplicate it on purpose.
People dont overcomplicate on purpose, that just doesnt happen. No one in the world is inherently evil, theyre just doing what seems right from their perspective. The problem isnt really overcomplication, it's that programming itself is complicated. Even with that, I dont think that being "unable to learn" it is ever correct. If you just stay curious and learn a little bit at a time and keep experimenting, you can probably become so much more skilled at it over time than you thought you ever could be. It takes effort but I think youre wrong in saying you cant.
Usually, it gets forced by some management, or some practices people learn. Extremely well designed object oriented programming is very easy to read. Much easier than functional or plain old C, because the functions are with the data.
Learn to program in C. It has a name of being hard, but that's incorrect imo. It's hard to write large software packages in C, but the language itself is pretty straightforward. And a great thing about learning that way is that sooner or later you will run into the limitations of the language, and then you will easily pick up on more abstract ideas like object-oriented programming. And you'll learn it not as the one true way, but as a technique that is in some cases helpful.
Good video. I was long mired in the OOP world, but a few years ago I started delving into the functional and procedural side of things. At this point, I'd say that I FAR prefer a functional or procedural approach. To me, moving away from classical OOP has been liberating and empowering (and I'd say it's also helped me when I do need to work in OOP codebases). It's changed the way I work. I hardly ever need to step through my own code with a debugger, these days. And I no longer care much about Intellisense-like tools which I used to think of as an absolute requirement -- I no longer need them the way I used to. I know there are many who are deeply invested in the OOP paradigm, think of it positively, and want to defend it (I was one of those programmers). To anyone in that position, I'd encourage you to investigate functional and procedural paradigms with an open mind. You might be surprised to find that you are a happier and better programmer moving with a move away from the OOP world. If not, and you still prefer OOP, there's no loss. Learning different ways of thinking about code will help you in the OOP world, too, and make you a better programmer overall.
I am a big proponent of OOP, but I came to watch this with an open mind hoping to learn something. It turns out we agree on many points, but probably that's because I'm not taking OOP to the extreme, for example I don't agree with / don't do these: * Some OOP folks think there can be no such thing as simple types: even int and double must be a class. * Taking encapsulation too far, where you can't even access simple types from an object directly, no it must use setters and getters. * Trying to force everything into objects even when it doesn't really fit. Some things really are just plain data and plain functions. There are however some things about the other end of the spectrum that I find absolutely godawful: * Having your state scattered into a sea of global variables that are read and/or modified by functions which don't take them as a arguments, and in the worst case even having those globals be used across files. * Having lots of separate variables not organized into structs or classes, and a set of functions not organized into namespaces or classes that you have to guess what belongs with what and which are intended to be used together. * Having long complex procedures rather than capturing key parts into functions or at least scopes. This is analogous to writing a wall of text rather than using paragraphs.
Very interesting I disagree with some of the specifics, mostly about function usage. Having clear functions that do obvious jobs is better than forcing everyone to read 10,000 lines of code that they're not directly interacting with. And if they do need to check the function they can jump to it's definition. I do feel this could be a matter of semantics as I typically only break out sub-functions when they're used multiple times, fairly low level and/or quite long but low value on the core behaviour of the function. The low level code is typically hidden behind a function so that newer hires have a nice clean function name to know what's going on rather than looking at large chunks of memory management and trying to discern their purpose.
While I agree with some of what you say, I think functions hardly ever break the 1000 line mark even in the most complex codebases. And if they do, the procedure they're performing is likely to just be *that* complex and should be understood fully before being changed. If code is properly separated into sections and commented (as Brian showed near the end of the video), it's easy to skim. And if you need to delve into details, you have everything in place without having to piece things together in your mind. Also, when you're new you're not going to know what the nouns (or objects/structures) in the code do, so you're forced to read the functions anyway. Or risk missing some important side effect of a function. Besides, function names can never be as descriptive as a full sentence in a comment. So it's a mess. A skilled programmer should be able to read and/or skim long stretches of code, whereas a new programmer might not understand enough about the system to not be forced to read the functions themselves.
What's wrong with that.. If it represents logical unit, then it should be in one function... Long function does not automatically represents something bad ...
Because when programmers code, they try to make it as efficient and as short as possible, that way if theres a bug in the function, they don't have to go through 3000 lines of code to figure out what went wrong.
Object oriented programming has some good ideas, which applied intelligently can help produce good code. But when those ideas are reduced to formulas and applied blindly, you can get some very bad code. And the latter seems to be the norm for much of the industry.
24:29, I couldn’t listen further. I started programming a Z80 in machine code in the early eighties (yes, I am a boomer). Then I went through at least 30 more programming languages, and various S/W engineering methods. I have worked for small and big companies, now I am a freelancer. I have developed all sort of firmware and software, in many different domains. I really don’t understand the point, here. Is it that we shouldn’t apply oop in a too religious and fundamentalist way? But that applies to everything in life, it’s just commonsense, you don’t need 44 minutes to say that, or a clickbait title. The mix of techniques you shall use highly depends on what type of software you are developing. And anyway, oop is an important one, among them. The need for a multiplicity of tools and techniques is true more in general, for any job where you design and build something, even carpentry. Now, go tell a carpenter that hammers are bad!
Oftentimes I find that when a module gets to a certain size and complexity, my gut tells tells me it's time to refactor into several object classes. Sometimes it feels like I'm congealing the code I've written into separate piles, but over time I get an intuition about what data and functions belong to which classes. Fortunately, I learned the hard way to keep objects and calls strictly hierarchical. For myself, I have found OOP generally to be the best way to organize code. Having said that, I enjoyed your video and I should be able to find things I can use. Thank you.
Having no experience whatsoever and not bragging about doing what everybody else has been doing for the past 30 years, following the herd, I can appreciate the advice of an honest man! Thanks!
He told us what not th read at the end there, but what would be the best stuff to read if we wish to adopt this method of programming? I took C++ and JAVA in college in 2001 and it didn't seem as complex as both do now. I use C# with WPF now and it can sometimes be a bear to use the cross over functionality. I endure it because I love WPF.
He was saying that the inner scope should not be able to access any data that's not explicitly passed in to it. This would let the reader temporarily forget all about any variable which is not immediately necessary for the next logical step. I don't know about c++ but local anonymous functions / closures in both php and js are not restricted in this way. He also mentions that the data is always passed by copy - not by reference - ensuring immutability.
I really liked this video! At the time of writing, so did more than 3 quarters of the people who gave it thumbs, which is really reassuring after reading through the horrible comment section. I have to admit that I related to every single example that was given, and it brought back painful memories of so many years of writing code. Thanks Brian! Now I don't have to feel guilty any more, and I have the courage to say it! :)
OOP is wonderful for large codebases. I have worked far too long on the IBM iSeries platform with its go-tos, and top-down programming. It doesn't work. It's nearly impossible to upgrade codebases that are gigantic and written top down quickly, and they're insanely error prone. Local versus global variables and isolating data in OPP makes life SO MUCH BETTER. I feel like you haven't ever worked on a gigantic codebase.
This is true, and i also feel like this video has nothing to do with areas of coding that arent database/website associated. Like simulations, or even game dev, where you dont need all data to be stored or returned somewhere. In that context youre not just "performing an action on data", youre using objects to capture behaviours, and having them split into classes with encapsulation allows that process to make sense, without ending up with a script thats 20000 lines of code. Entity-Component DOTS style coding is often a better choice, but its readability is atrocious compared to OOP, and thats important for quick testing and turn around times. The idea that a style as useful, flexible and readable as OOP is just blanket "bad", is really more just an admission that you dont know when to use it, or how to use it.
i like how rust is still at its core very procedural and functional. even when you want more object-oriented behaviour, it still has you separate behaviour from data in a way that is actually modular. you can still `impl MyStruct` to tie behaviour to data types, but this is a conscious decision of the programmer rather than being a limitation like it is in many natively OOP languages.
And you forgot to mention enums that can embed some data for the caller function... That helps a lot. But yeah, defining objects as their behavior is (I think) easier than trying to get their true type...
I like how rust at its core is still worthless like every other opinionated language and C++ is still industry standard in 2024 because it's only opinion is about actually being usable in real world conditions.
41:55 C++ has a solution for this: lambda functions, so instead of doing "use x, y { ... }", you do "[x, y] { ... }". It won't have access to any other variable than x and y. Edit: and it does exactly what you want, it makes clones of those variables, and if you really want to change them, you can pass them as reference for ex, with &x. It's really like having a function but without having to name one, and it can be placed anywhere.
@@jukit3906 SO, it emulate a function with args passed by Value.. great note : capture can also do references. Still the same functionality as a named function, but the named function can be shared more , re-used more and syntax is cryptic ..
@@moestietabarnak nope, it is more useful: it is dynamic (that is, a function can hold lambdas with different captures and function bodies) Only virtual member functions are comparables.
