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Object-Oriented Programming is Garbage: 3800 SLOC example

Brian Will · 257.8K views · 2016-03-22 · 52:48

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Overview

Brian Will critiques object-oriented programming and rewrites a roughly 3800-line OO program in a procedural style, cutting code and complexity. It is part of a series of OOP critiques.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a concrete, worked example of the case against heavy OOP rather than abstract argument.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2016–2022

Topics

Software architecture & designSoftware practice, open source & careers
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oopprocedural programmingrefactoringsoftware designcode complexity

What people said

codemonkey-zeta · 2022-06 · Strong recommendation

For anyone unfamiliar, I recommend the whole series, but it also culminates in the presenter rewriting an entire nontrivial OOP program into a procedural one and saving whopping amounts of code/complexity. The big example helps to show this isn't just abstract rambling against OOP. [VIDEO]

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lj3 · 2016-12 · Recommendation

There are three talks, actually. Here are the other two. Object-Oriented Programming is Embarrassing: 4 Short Examples[0] Object-Oriented Programming is Garbage: 3800 SLOC example[1] [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]

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barking · 2017-06 · Reference

Brian Will, the guy behind the 'why OOP is bad' youtube video brings this into his argument. In a follow up video to that video he rewrites an OO program in procedural style. In doing so he reduced the number of methods/functions from 321 to 113, 54 of which were contained inside other functions as they were only accessed by the containing function. The total number of lines of code remained about the same. That's over 200 fewer meaningful names to try to come up with in a short program. Plus the fact that functions that do bigger tasks are easier to name in the first place, imo. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Brian Will, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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