Object Oriented Programming is a disaster, or at least that’s what Brian Will thinks, and I’m not about to disagree. I share his disillusionment with OOP, and I have always had a sneaking admiration for the PHP and JavaScript developers who just seem to get stuff done much faster than their static-typed object brethren.

However, one paragraph did stick out:

In [the] original vision, an object-oriented program is composed of a graph of objects, each an island of state unto itself. Other objects do not read or write the state of other objects directly but instead send messages.

Just because OOP as we write it today hasn’t produced the benefits we sought, doesn’t mean that there is no value in the original concepts. The difference between now and then is one of scale: how many of you out there are actually writing single programs, where a system is composed of objects that all live in a single app domain and communicate via messages?

I don’t think I’ve ever written such an app (it’s much harder in the web world in any case, where the app simply has no state from one request to the next). Where I have been writing actual, run-in-memory-UI-and-everything applications, they’ve been small utility apps that I’ve thrown together using RAD, that simply wrapped functionality that already existed in databases or services.

That, right there, is the part where OOP hasn’t failed – it has just, like the Roman Empire, transformed into something else. Instead of objects, think services – think how an enterprise system is composed of many disparate systems, services and databases, each of which are tied together by some form of message. In the worst case, they share state promiscuously and become an un-maintainable tangle, but in the best cases, we have services that sit serenely in the heavens and send messages back and forth to each other.

Or we could just hack it together with PHP and buy a bigger server.