Objects Never? Well, Hardly Ever
In the VIEWPOINT section of Communications of The ACM, I found an
interesting article entitled "Objects Never? Well, Hardly Ever".
It’s a radically different perspective than objects-first or objects-late. He suggests "objects-never" or maybe "objects-graduate school".
The author talked about OOP and made a question about how OOP is used
in real world programming environments. He thinks that OOP is not the
dominant programming model. For example, he claims, 70% of
programmings are done for Embedded Systems where OOP is not really
suited.
When some professors in universities wants to talk about the benefits
of OOP, they talk about code-reuse. As another example, again, he
claims, this is not the real case in real world. code-reuse is harder
than what's claimed in universities:
I claim that the use of OOP is not as prevalent as most people believe, that it is not as successful as its proponents claim, and, therefore, that its central place in the CS curriculum is not justified.
It's interesting for me to know how people in stack-overflow think
about this? Is OOP the dominant programming model from programmers'
point of view?
If I should choose/learn/use just one approach, is it OOP or not? why?
Best Answer
If you're interested in practical programming, the proceedings of ACM and the likes is the last source you want to read. These are often [pseudo]-scientific publications with no application in the real world. These are quite often unorthodox opinions made for publicity, for the writer to differentiate himself from the crowd and promote his own person.
I tend to disagree with your point. OOP is widely spread and works just fine. By the number OOP-based projects have likely surpassed developments done with other strategies (let's speak about modern time, 15-20 years).
However OOP is not a silver bullet. It works for some developments, doesn't work for others. Just like any other approach.
But one thing I need to mention is that a curriculum should communicate knowledge of different approaches. If it's OOP-based, it's wrong. If it's FP-based, it's wrong. It should cover them all or don't touch this topic altogether.
P.S. Why care about what is dominant and what is not? Just take what is suitable for the project at hand and leave the numbers to "researchers".