StackOverflow2013

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals

PO
text
Body
copied!<p>From my experience which started in C/Unix (non OOP) in the mid 1980s then moving onto C++ (OOP) in 1990 and then into Java around 1996 (OOP) I have found OOP to give a massive boost to productivity, maintainability and robustness compared with the large non OOP programs I was working on earlier.</p> <p>The main thing I have observed is that in non OOP applications I have worked on the complexity seemed to grow at an exponential rate with respect to the sophistication of the application whereas in the OOP applications I worked on the complexity seemed to have a much more linear relationship with repect to the sophistication of the application.</p> <p>In other words - with well designed OOP applications you never get that "OMG the source code for this app is getting waaaaay out of control" feeling that you get with large non OOP applications.</p> <p>The other things I can't do without as an OOP developer is the way I can write code that models the real world entities that exist in the application's problem domain. Objects take on a life of their own - way beyond what any structs (C) or Records (Pascal) did back in the bad old =] non OOP days.</p> <p>The one stipulation is that the chief architect of an OOP project must know what he's doing and he has to usually put more thinking time into getting the design right than in actually implementing it but the payback for 'thinking things through up front' is truly amazing. Opportunities for reuse or awesomely cool design optimizations come to light that have you punching the air and doing touchdowns in the office... ok, that might look a bit strange to the others in the office but that kind of enthusiasm never happened in the non OOP days :)</p> <p>I've seen some pretty badly written OOP code and maybe that's what you've experienced which may have lead you to ask the question. As a contractor in the mid 90s I often found that the 'OO' design had already been started by someone who knew what a class was but not much more. It was a very painful experience and I often found that my first few months in a job involved educating the team in the very different way of 'OO' thinking. It was only after everyone's brain had been rewired that we could all proceed as a team to create something awesome.</p> <p>Many people find the 'brain rewiring' process too hard, painful or just too much effort and so spend their life dissin' OOP and so you'll find a lot of OO haters out there but I'm happy about that because it's those people that make people like me look good: "What, you can do it for $X and it will be ready in 2 months and you will give us a maintainable code base!!! Wow, can you start today?"</p>

Querying!

Guidance

An individual column

Larger individual text columns get their own page to allow for proper reading.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload