You'll find lots of opinions about OOP. Some reputable software
engineers don't like it at all. And like any programming paradigm, it
has suffered lots of abuse, giving it a bad name.
For me, I find it has its place. For several years I've gotten used to
thinking in terms of classes/objects but that's only because I've been
programming in C++ or other language that supports classes. If I shift
over to a different language that isn't so, I work with whatever the
best practices are for that language. It's definitely good though to
understand the helpful/useful principles in any programming paradigm and
incorporate them into your toolbox.
All the best to you, Nate, in your future programming endeavors!
Mark
On 1/6/2026 6:10 PM, Duke Normandin wrote:
On Tue, 6 Jan 2026 14:29:28 -0500
Mark Bratcher <[email protected]> wrote:
It's not easy diving into OOP at this level without general OOP
concepts and purpose, which are independent of the language being
used.
Thanks you for your detailed post! Although I _am_ aware of the "4
Pillars of OOP", I'm not intimately familiar with them.
I've been hacking code since 1981 or so - never using OOP - but
using Perl, C, PHP, various Lisps & Schemes.
The Smalltalk code I wrote was intended to created a
function/method that could be called in order to return a
temperature using a particular scale.
I was not interested in what "universe" the "object" lived in that
I needed the temperature for. Just like I the `abs' function
doesn't care what its given argument pertains to. `abs' is simply a
built-in function, or one living it a "math" library/module/package.
It seems to me that OOP insists on creating mini universes for
everything and linking these universes together using inheritance,
as well as creating convoluted rules as to what can done, seen,
how and when.
Maybe it's just the Smalltalk syntax that is getting in my way. I'm
going to try some other OOP supported language to see if the whole
process becomes more intuitive for me.
Thanks for yours and others' input!
