Here’s an idea: the current backlash against OOP is actually because people aren’t doing OOP, they’re doing whatever they were doing before OOP. But they’re calling it OOP, because the people who were promoting OOP wanted them to believe that they were already doing OOP.
Why is that? Because the people who were promoting OOP wanted to sell their things. They were doing this in the 1980s to 1990s, when you could still expect developers to spend thousands of dollars on tools and libraries. “Here’s a thing that’s completely unlike what you’re already doing” is not as good a sales pitch as “ride the latest wave without boiling the ocean”. Object-Oriented principles were then hidden by the “Object Technology” companies – the StepStones, NeXTs, OTIs, OMGs – who wanted to make OOP accessible in order to sell their Object Technology.
That’s not the world of 2017. Nowadays, developer environments, libraries, deployment platforms etc are largely open source and free or very cheap, so rather than make an idea seem accessible, people try to make it seem important. We see that with the current wave (third wave? I’m not sure) of functional programming evangelism, where people are definitely trying to show that they are “functionaller than thou” rather than that you already know this stuff. Throw up a github or an npm that uses monad, pointfree or homoiconic without any indication of shame, and you’re functionalling right. Demonstrating that it’s already possible to curry methods in Objective-C is not the right way to functional.
If OOP were introduced into this world, you’d probably have a more dogmatic, “purer” representation of it than OOP as popularly practised today. You might even have OOP in Java.
One thing that makes me think that is that, well, it’s happened and it’s true. Multiple times. As previously explored here, protocol-oriented programming is just polymorphism under another name, and polymorphism will be found in a big-letters heading in any OOP book (in Barbara Liskov’s “Program Development in Java”, it’s chapter 8, “Polymorphic Abstractions”. In Bertrand Meyer’s “Touch of Class”, section 16.2, “Polymorphism”.
Similarly, what are microservices other than independent programs that maintain their own data and the operations on those data, performing those operations in response to receiving messages? What is a router at the front of a microservice but the message dispatch handler, picking a method implementation by examining the content of a selector?
