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copied!<p><strong>My controversial opinion: Object Oriented Programming is absolutely the worst thing that's ever happened to the field of software engineering.</strong></p> <p>The primary problem with OOP is the total lack of a rigorous definition that everyone can agree on. This easily leads to implementations that have logical holes in them, or language like Java that adhere to this bizarre religious dogma about what OOP means, while forcing the programmer into doing all these contortions and "design patterns" just to work around the limitations of a particular OOP system.</p> <p>So, OOP tricks the programmer into thinking they're making these huge productivity gains, that OOP is somehow a "natural" way to think, while forcing the programmer to type boatloads of unnecessary boilerplate.</p> <p>Then since nobody knows what OOP actually means, we get vast amounts of time wasted on petty arguments about whether language X or Y is "truly OOP" or not, what bizarre cargo cultish language features are absolutely "essential" for a language to be considered "truly OOP".</p> <p>Instead of demanding that this language or that language be "truly oop", we should be looking at what language features are shown by experiment, to <em>actually</em> increase productivity, instead of trying to force it into being some imagined ideal language, or indeed forcing our programs to conform to some platonic ideal of a "truly object oriented program".</p> <p>Instead of insisting that our programs conform to some platonic ideal of "Truly object oriented", how about we focus on adhering to good engineering principles, making our code easy to read and understand, and using the features of a language that are productive and helpful, regardless of whether they are "OOP" enough or not.</p>

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