Rob Pike on OOP
original: https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/hoJdanihKwb

A few years ago I saw this page: 
http://www.csis.pace.edu/~bergin/patterns/ppoop.html

Local discussion focused on figuring out whether this was a joke or not. 
For a while, we felt it had to be even though we knew it wasn't. Today 
I'm willing to admit the authors believe what is written there. They are 
sincere.

But... I'd call myself a hacker, at least in their terminology, yet my 
solution isn't there. Just search a small table! No objects required. 
Trivial design, easy to extend, and cleaner than anything they present. 
Their "hacker solution" is clumsy and verbose. Everything else on this 
page seems either crazy or willfully obtuse. The lesson drawn at the end 
feels like misguided epistemology, not technological insight.

It has become clear that OO zealots are afraid of data. They prefer 
statements or constructors to initialized tables. They won't write 
table-driven tests. Why is this? What mindset makes a multilevel type 
hierarchy with layered abstractions better than searching a three-line 
table? I once heard someone say he felt his job was to remove all while 
loops from everyone's code, replacing them with object stuff. Wat?

But there's good news. The era of hierarchy-driven, keyword-heavy, 
colored-ribbons-in-your-textook orthodoxy seems past its peak. More 
people are talking about composition being a better design principle 
than inheritance. And there are even some willing to point at the naked 
emperor; see http://prog21.dadgum.com/156.html for example. There are 
others. Or perhaps it's just that the old guard is reasserting itself.

Object-oriented programming, whose essence is nothing more than 
programming using data with associated behaviors, is a powerful idea. It 
truly is. But it's not always the best idea. And it is not well served 
by the epistemology heaped upon it.

Sometimes data is just data and functions are just functions.