OOP Case Study

As a result of these problems, to achieve high levels of reuse in OOP, one is often forced to write very small classes, which leads to an explosion in the number of classes in a system. (Krubner 2014, 41) The irony of all of this is that programmers reuse code without OOP—often by simply copying and pasting. There 's no need to superimpose some elaborate structure of interacting, instantiated objects, with all the messaging and fragility that it introduces into a program. (Mansfield 2005, 1)

7. OOP IS MORE DIFFICULT TO LEARN

OOP requires more discipline, management and training than classic software development does. (Shah 1997, 1) Even though it dominates the tech industry, object-oriented programming is a poorly defined, amorphous concept.

A readable language allows students to, after only a very short time, take educated guesses at the meanings of constructs. Producing an object-oriented program that is readily understandable to students is a real challenge. (KÖlling 1999; 6, 10, 11, 14) Consider the following remarks by programmer Chad Columbus:

“I find OOP harder to read, harder to maintain, and harder to use. PP [procedural programming] seems so intuitive and straight forward. I find most PP code I can read and understand with very little in the way of comments or documentation, the code is the code you can see what it is doing (it is mostly self-documenting). In OOP I find that I am constantly trying to figure out what it is doing, it seems more... nebulous. I normally have to jump around more; it is not like PP where you are mostly reading top down.” (Columbus 2010, 1)

To the extent that it is possible to be objective when comparing languages, one can evaluate how close the code matches the task to be achieved and ask questions such as: (i) How much does one need to engage in “stupid tricks and worthless ceremony” to get a job done? (ii) Which code is more direct to its task? (iii) Which notation allows the clearest expression of the problem? Many experts conclude that traditional procedural programs use code that best matches the task to be achieved. (Krubner 2014,

Students find it very difficult to understand object-oriented concepts like classes, constructor invocation, overloaded constructors, friend functions, and other object oriented concepts. (Biju 2013, 2) OOP is a very abstract concept. Until a programmer has experience with writing large programs, the programmer will not understand why using classes and objects makes programming easier. “Instead, the neophyte is left with a steep learning curve to climb and no idea why they 're climbing it.” (Sweigart 2014,