Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> It came out around the time OOP was the latest crazy, and everything 
> that wasn't OO was old and obsolete, and OO was the wave of the future. 
> So they took the existing language, bolted on a few very superficially 
> OO syntax elements, and said "Hey! Look! Our product is OO now! BUY IT!!"

  Criticism of the overhyping of object-oriented programming is nothing new.
A famous paper named "My cat is object-oriented" was published in 1989.
(The title is a jab at the fact that anything that claims to be "object-
oriented" sells better, thus if you are selling your cat...)

> About the only /useful/ thing it actually added was a per-type namespace 
> for methods. What's it, really. You could /already/ group code and data 
> together using modules, so the mere syntactic ability to write one 
> inside the other isn't much of a big deal.

  No, what object-oriented programming added was inheritance and
polymorphism. Modules (complete with member functions, public and
private sections, module instantiation and references) existed before
object-oriented programming. What OOP added was inheritance, dynamic
binding and the ability to handle objects polymorphically.

  There are some applications where OOP fits like a glove (eg. GUI
programming), but in most situations just the modular part of OOP is
more than enough.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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