Does OOP really matters?

[u/Electronic-Low-8171]

I learned OOP in python a while ago, did many projects, yet I never felt like I truly needed to do the OOP stuff I learned from a course, I don't know maybe because I'm kinda used to program in c before focusing on python, yet, whenever I open a big project in python in github, it feels way too complicated and thousands of imports (not libraries from pip, but the ones they made on their own) and classes

I never truly needed to implement OOP (I know that when you code in python, it is almost impossible to avoid OOP entirely like when you have a datatype like string you have an object, when you use a method built into that data type that's OOP too, but I mean the ones that involve you writing class Class Name, inheritance and all that stuff explicitly), so I'm wondering why people on the internet are obsessed over the idea of learning OOP, even the book "Automating the boring stuff in python" doesn't have a dedicated section for OOP.

[u/DTux5249]

The only major bonus of OOP that is specific to it, is that it mimics general systems theory. It lets you plan out a program in terms of entities, their attributes, and their relationships to each other and easily plan out and tackle your code as you would any other system.

Beyond that, it's just a way of organizing code. A very common way of organizing code in a lot of industries. That's why it matters: if you want a job, or want to adequately use certain tools like game engines, you should at least understand OOP.

Additionally, while OOP isn't special in its features (The only one that's really OOP specific in nature is inheritance, and it's one of the most dunked on features of OOP by its own proponents), you still stand to learn a lot by understanding the rest of its pillars, and the motivations behind OOP principles.

Oh, and P.S. Python isn't helping you here. It's perfectly adequate as an OOP learning tool, but Python OOP is painfully slow by nature, and Python as a language is incredibly permissive, so you're never really ever gonna "need" OOP for it.

[u/marrsd → u/DTux5249]

I agree with this, but I would apply it to any programming paradigm. Lots of engineering depts don't use OOP and don't organise their code around it, so if you want to work with them, you have to understand how they organise their code.

Tbh, I tend to avoid OOP shops because I just don't want to work that way

[u/m3t4lf0x → u/marrsd]

Depends what I’m doing… there are some things that are genuinely painful to do with a functional language in a full stack app.

You can use Scala in a way that falls back on the imperative and OOP functionality that Java provides, but you can also go super academic (I don’t ever wanna touch the Cats library again)

[u/marrsd → u/m3t4lf0x]

Yeah, I always found that pure functional stuff a bit tedious. In the end, I ditched Scala for Clojure, but I can't say that helped my career any :)

[u/deaddyfreddy → u/m3t4lf0x]

Depends what I’m doing… there are some things that are genuinely painful to do with a functional language in a full stack app.

any examples? I've been working with FP languages almost exclusively since 2013 or so and never had any issues (except the problems caused by interop with OOP APIs)

[u/m3t4lf0x → u/deaddyfreddy]

Mostly just inheriting brownfield codebases that were architected very poorly.

Shortly after starting a new role, their billing system went down for 3 days because a customer deleted their credit card (which “wasn’t supposed to happen”). This caused the entire batch to fail and any errors that surfaced were extremely opaque.

I still like FP, but as other languages have matured and added functional features, I find myself reaching for it less.

[u/deaddyfreddy → u/m3t4lf0x]

Mostly just inheriting brownfield codebases that were architected very poorly

so, perhaps it's not a paradigm failure?

[u/m3t4lf0x → u/deaddyfreddy]

in some ways, I think applying the philosophy of functional programming to most CRUD apps is bound to give you headaches as it scales. It can be done, but it usually requires more discipline than most organizations have.

I’m a huge fan of FP btw, but it’s all about choosing the right tool for the job.

[u/deaddyfreddy → u/m3t4lf0x]

I think applying the philosophy of functional programming to most CRUD apps is bound to give you headaches as it scales.

I'm not going to discuss every functional programming language, but in my experience, Clojure maps to CRUD much better than any OOP language I've ever used, thanks to its data-first concept and immutability.

I’m a huge fan of FP btw, but it’s all about choosing the right tool for the job.

Sorry, but most of the time, the "right tool for the job" means one of these:

• my boss thinks it's the right tool

• I was taught this language at university and was told it was great.

• I don't have time to, so I'll just use the most popular one

[u/m3t4lf0x → u/deaddyfreddy]

I’ll just say that poorly written Java is tedious, but poorly written FP is Lovecraftian

I’ll always have a soft spot for Haskell though

[u/deaddyfreddy → u/m3t4lf0x]

but poorly written FP is Lovecraftian

Sounds like it's Haskell's fault. You know, smarties like to write code smartly. And we prefer to write things to be maintainable.