this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Programming

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Object-oriented design is about message-passing; messages are more important than objects. Classes are completely irrelevant -- there's an entire branch of object-oriented language design without classes!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

there’s an entire branch of object-oriented language design without classes!

That's not OOP anymore. There's definitely a lot of OOP code out there (especially in the Java world) that goes way too far with inheritance and class structures, and good OOP code relies a lot less on classes - but they are still used and a critical component of the style of programming.

Object-oriented design is about message-passing;

I'd argue that's an implementation detail rather than part of OOP. Also it's rarely used in modern OOP languages because it's just too slow*. Unfortunately when you take it away some patterns are lost, but the trade off is generally worth it.

(* when I used to work in Objective-C, message sending was often slower than all of the rest of my code combined and in tight loops I'd often rewrite my OOP code as procedural C code in order to have acceptable performance. Never need to do that in Swift, which doesn't do messages)

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

Whatever it may have become in later years, Alan Kay, who is often called "The Father of Object-oriented Programming", outlined the message-passing idea as the main concept he was driving at, originally.

He also says that he probably misnamed it.

Here's a discussion in which the man himself makes a (small) appearance: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/46592/so-what-did-alan-kay-really-mean-by-the-term-object-oriented

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

JavaScript is an example of how OOP can be done without classes (before they were added to appease Java enthusiasts).