object oriented programming

A ruthless battle occurs every day on the World Wide Web. Its goal is to decide which programming flavor is the best: OOP or FP? I assume that imperative and procedural programming are not part of the contenders. Arguments range from the factual to the irrelevant to the utterly stupid. A couple of years ago, I wanted to listen to a video of Martin Odersky (of Scala fame). I remember neither the exact talk nor the subject.

With Java 8 streams, it seems Functional Programming has won. Long live statelessness and recursion! Reality is a bit more nuanced: as always in software programming, it depends. I believe that the more tools in your toolbelt, the better it is. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In Functional Programming, every function needs to be pure: output only depends on input, and there are no side-effects.

This week, during a workshop related to a Java course I give at a higher education school, I noticed the code produced by the students was mostly - ok, entirely, procedural. In fact, though the Java language touts itself as an Object-Oriented language, it’s not uncommon to find such code developed by professional developers in enterprises. For example, the JavaBean specification is in direct contradiction of one of OOP’s main principle, encapsulation.

UPDATED on March 13, 2017: Add Builder pattern section Most developers have strong opinions regarding whether a language should be strongly-typed or weakly-typed, whatever notions they put behind those terms. Some also actively practice stringly-typed programming - mostly without even being aware of it. It happens when most of attributes and parameters of a codebase are String.

My post about immutability provoked some stir and received plenty of comments, from the daunting to the interesting, both on reddit and here.

The more I program, the easier it gets. However, the more questions arise regarding programming. This week, my thinking was about Object-Oriented Programming. I’ve been told that OOP is about encapsulating state and behavior is a single isolated unit. In languages I know, state translates into attributes and behavior into methods. public class Cat { private Color color; public void mew() { ...