OOP: Good or Bad?

I didn't know there was any critism towards OOP until today (I guess I'm naive), and I've seen many articles that critisize OOP. I haven't had the time to read them, but I'm just curious as to how you guys feel about it. Feel free to argue your side.

I did a quick google search, but the only hits i was getting were from folks who didn't know OOP, how to utilize it effectively, or "I did procedural coding for 100+ years and it's never failed me" type arguments. Do you have any of your links saved?

I seem to remember something about folks complaining about the overhead associated with object creation. While this *might* be valid in a time critical systems, i would assume this would be an exception and not a rule.

I voted yes though, I had the pleasure of updating the db connection string in 15+ different classes because we changed the database name and it was hardcoded into each class that used it. Then I got to do a full regression test. That was enough to convince me

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 03/15/2006 15:47:14

tfecw wrote:Do you have any of your links saved?

If you look at the wikipedia article for Object Oriented programming, at the way bottom on the right there's a section called Criticism.

Thanks...I'm still waiting for my weblogic platform server to update (hurrah for computers that don't meet the min requirements)
and did some further reading.

I found the OOP Bad site as well via a devx article. I only skimmed the OOP bad site. I might get around to reading it in depth. Seems fairly interesting.

I voted undecided since I have yet to see both sides of the argument.

Anyone else's take on this?

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 03/16/2006 12:12:36

Just as I don't use a tire jack when planting a garden I use OOP concepts where they make sense. I have written many small Java programs that only have a main in them.

I personally think that in a largish system or program well designed OO is extremely valuable. But, like most programming paradigms, you can create a rats nest pretty easily. OOP doesn't remove the need to think - it just gives you the tools to implement your code in a clean way.

So I'm going to vote a qualified "good". Qualified by the fact that you should use the tools that are appropriate for the job. A small embedded controller that has to run in 2K of ROM would likely not benefit from OOP and indeed might suffer. In this day when my not-very-high-end cell phone has 4096 times the memory of my first computer (Timex Sinclair 1000) and a programming environment such as J2SE is about twice as big as the first hard drive I ever had (20MB) there are places for OOP.

This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 03/16/2006 18:34:56

I honestly think OOP is EVIL!!

GeeksUnite wrote:I honestly think OOP is EVIL!!

Then why did you vote Good?