I had a good chuckle at the end of the referenced material
"The object-oriented programmers see the nature of computation as a swarm of interacting agents that provide services for other objects. Further, the sophisticated OO programmer lets the system take care of all polymorphic tasks possible. This programmer sees the essence of object oriented programming as the naive object-oriented programmer may not."
Hey Dan! What wrong with the program?
Sorry, my swarm of interacting agents had a polymorphic pile-up on aisle 7. Dangling pointers everywhere. It's not pretty.
Snarky jokes about buzzword soup aside, I love OO. We simply need to be aware that OO lets us "play" at building complicated things when 1000x simpler solutions may be available. OO works best for large-scale, lots-of-people projects. A lot of business projects are like that. Many personal and startup projects are not. The trick in loving any particular tool in the toolbox is knowing when not to use it. So the example is a little bit unfair -- it's tough to create a real-world example program of sufficient complexity to use in OO examples. All the examples look like architecture astronauttery.
"OO works best for large-scale, lots-of-people projects."
Nice! But, I think it is the other way around. Throw a lot of people at something with some software architects and you'll probably have a large-scale, lots-of-people, "OO" project.
I worked at a company that was between small and mid size and had ~150 developers. We bought another company that basically did the same with 10x fewer, and that group won out over ours. We had some excellent developers that went on to other excellent shops, and I was proud of the work that we did there and learned a lot about process. It was the best run development team I ever worked for and probably ever will.
I was an "OO" developer, now I'm just a developer. Not because of that learning experience, but because I found Ruby and I no longer see the benefit in intentionally writing overly large applications. Ruby is truely more OO than Java, imo, but I don't write like I used to which I think is what is being called "OO" (lots of packages and interfaces, pattern usage, lots of maven projects).
"The object-oriented programmers see the nature of computation as a swarm of interacting agents that provide services for other objects. Further, the sophisticated OO programmer lets the system take care of all polymorphic tasks possible. This programmer sees the essence of object oriented programming as the naive object-oriented programmer may not."
Hey Dan! What wrong with the program?
Sorry, my swarm of interacting agents had a polymorphic pile-up on aisle 7. Dangling pointers everywhere. It's not pretty.
Snarky jokes about buzzword soup aside, I love OO. We simply need to be aware that OO lets us "play" at building complicated things when 1000x simpler solutions may be available. OO works best for large-scale, lots-of-people projects. A lot of business projects are like that. Many personal and startup projects are not. The trick in loving any particular tool in the toolbox is knowing when not to use it. So the example is a little bit unfair -- it's tough to create a real-world example program of sufficient complexity to use in OO examples. All the examples look like architecture astronauttery.