Is OOP abused in universities? [closed]

Answer 1

OOP is the right approach when your data can be well structured into objects.

For instance, for an embedded device that's processing an incoming stream of bytes from a sensor, there might not be much that can be clearly objectified.

Also in cases where ABSOLUTE control over performance is critical (when every cycle counts), an OOP approach can introduce costs that might be nontrivial to compute.

In the real world, most often, your problem can be VERY well described in terms of objects, although the law of leaky abstractions must not be forgotten!

Industry generally resolves, eventually, for the most part, to using the right tool for the job, and you can see OOP in many many places. Exceptions are often made for high-performance and low-level. Of course, there are no hard and fast rules.

You can hammer in a screw if you stick at it long enough...

Answer 2

My 5 cents:

OOP is just one instance of a larger pattern: dealing with complexity by breaking down a big problem into smaller ones. Our feeble minds are limited to a small number of ideas they can handle at any given time. Even a moderately sized commercial application has more moving parts than most folks can fully maintain a complete mental picture of at a time. Some of the more successful design paradigms in software engineering capitalize on the notion of dealing with complexity. Whether it's breaking your architecture into layers, your program into modules, doing a functional breakdown of actions, using pre-built components, leveraging independent web services, or identifying objects and classes in your problem and solution spaces. Those are all tools for taming the beast that is complexity.

OOP has been particularly successful in several classes of problems. It works well when you can think about the problem in terms of "things" and the interactions between them. It works quite well when you're dealing with data, with user interfaces, or building general purpose libraries. The prevalence of these classes of apps helped make OOP ubiquitous. Other classes of problems call for other or additional tools. Operating systems distinguish kernel and user spaces, and isolate processes in part to avoid the complexity creep. Functional programming keeps data immutable to avoid the mesh of dependencies that occur with multithreading. Neither is your classic OOP design and yet they are crucial and successful in their own domains.

In your career, you are likely to face problems and systems that are larger than you could tackle entirely on your own. Your teacher are not only trying to equip you with the present tools of the trade. They are trying to convey that there are patterns and tools available for you to use when you are attempting to model real world problems. It's in your best interest to accumulate a collection of tools for your toolbox and choose the right tool(s) for the job. OOP is a powerful tool to have, but by far not the only one.

Answer 3

OOP is a real world computer concept that the university would be derelict to leave out of the curriculum. When you apply for jobs, you will be expected to be conversant in it.

That being said, pace jalf, OOP was primarily designed as a way to manage complexity. University projects written by one or two students on homework time are not a realistic setting for large projects like this, so the examples feel (and are) toy examples.

Also, it is important to realize that not everyone really sees OOP the same way. Some see it about encapsulation, and make huge classes that are very complex, but hide their state from any outside caller. Others want to make sure that a given object is only responsible for doing one thing and make a lot of small classes. Some seek an object model that closely mirrors real world abstractions that the program is trying to relate to, others see the object model as about how to organize the technical architecture of the problem, rather than the real world business model. There is no one true way with OOP, but at its core it was introduced as a way of managing complexity and keeping larger programs more maintainable over time.

Answer 4

My opinion, freely offered, worth as much...

OOD/OOP is a tool. How good of a tool depends on the person using it, and how appropriate it is to use in a particular case depends on the problem. If I give you a saw, you'll know how to cut wood, but you won't necessarily be able to build a house.

The buzz that I'm picking up on is that functional programming is the wave of the future because it's extremely friendly to multi-threaded environments, so OO might be obsolete by the time you graduate. ;-)