God is the President

By the way, the comparison of property rights to encapsulation tends to fly in the face of your OO = Communisim bit on your web site.

(quote from my webpage)

Why OOP Reminds Me of Communism

Economic communism spread like wildfire in the first half of the 20th century because it had such appealing ideals and ideas. Like OO, these ideals were very seductive on paper. Intellectuals all over the world were drawn in by its concepts in droves. However, the complexities and dynamism of human nature proved not to favor economic communism as a productive model when it hit the road of the real world. It was the test of the real world that deflated the socialism hype, not intellectual analysis for the most part.

(Perhaps economic communism allows for more equality, but mostly by making everybody equally poor. Further, it forms a kind of "social currency" based on schmoosing and favoritism that is nearly impossible to objectively measure and tax. Thus, it is still not really class-less, but simply makes classes harder to measure because the "currency" is mostly social in nature. In other words, it does not eliminate inequality, but instead makes it harder to identify.)

I am frankly jealous of OOP's cliches; or to be more specific, jealous of OOP's "cliche-ability". The cliches sound so convincing on first impression, yet take many pages and many tedious change-scenario analyses to de-hype. Like socialism, bashing capitalistic greed is easy to do and makes for great, gut-level sound-bytes. A counter-argument to such is rather long, and assumes a decent education and attention span.

Why can't you get it through your head that OOP is just a method? If your program is based on randomly timed events, and it needs to do more than one thing at at time, chances are the OOP model is going to fit better as an event handler. Is that too complex to understand?

I guess so. Give me a typical biz example. If you cummunicate between events mostly via tables, then things like transactions and A.C.I.D. handle much of the semaphore (multi-process conflict) issues for ya. Think of it like little client/server user-lettes or c/s-lettes. (Damn! I coined another silly term. Backlash mounting I am sure.)

(I forgot to add "OO is better at multi-process handling" to my 30-item "OO Myths" debunking website list. Thanks for reminding me)

might as well say "OOP is like string theory"

String theory has catchy cliches? I missed 'em.

OO has been applied in the real world and it continues to thrive and grow. Witness Microsofts new development (.NET) platform is now completely OO.

Microsoft has historically been ambivelant about OOP. However, when Java started stealing market share from VB and MS-C++, they pretty much cloned Java. Gates and Co are primarily interested in crushing competition, not paradigm battles. If assembler came back in style, they would promote MS-Assebler like living hell if needed to beat others.

Besides, many OO fanatics complain that most actual code written in Java and .NET is generally pretty procedural in nature. Further, I don't believe the "free market" always finds the best technical solutions. Hence we have things like QWERTY, Windows, and COBOL that won't go away. Evolution even fails to always produce the optimum design, at least in the shorter run. Humans have their scrotum on the outside, where it gets smacked easily. Other animals have solved this problem and don't need it "air cooled". OO is a big scrotum.

Regarding your quote, it is a bit vague. But I disagree that the input-process-output model has failed. Events in event driven programming (like GUI's) are i-p-o based. We just change the database or screen state instead of punched cards and tape these days. GUI's and HTTP are based on i-p-o. I don't see how it has failed (in general). Show me a specific failure in a typical biz app.

As far as "better modeling the real world", see the link about that on my webpage.

I will take IPO + relational over OO any day.

Further, it seems the author of that article is an "array programmer" based on his writings. He does not "get" relational.