But I would add "so far", AI and vibe could very well overtake OOP in a year or 2.
OOP was a dead end and academia has moved on if they were ever interested in the first place. It is strange that industry is 180 degrees out of phase here even as they stress the importance of "computer science fundamentals" like data structures and algorithms.
Modern OOP (not the original OOP by Alan Kay) is a human anti pattern.
It commits the cardinal sin to easy to understand systems: It hides state, and breaks data lineage.
In otherwords:
1. You cannot just go back up the stack to see if anyone has changed data you depend on. You also need to follow all parent and sibling branches.
2. And in the case of inheritance you cannot reason about Child A without understanding Parent 1..N
As a result OOP systems quickly hit the limit of context one developer can hold in their brain when developing and debugging.
FP on the other hand encourages and in some cases enforces you to encapsulate the inputs and outputs of your system to the arguments and values of a function. Making the system easy to reason about at any level.
Powerful composability and more thorough and easy testing are just beautiful by products.
Next on the list of worst things to happen to programming is Python's popularity as a CSC101 language, and its toe hold in mathematics with the rise of ML.
My school kept track of computer science graduates, and the numbers dropped sharply after copying MIT's example for their intro course. And predictably it was 4 years after the change.
Some might call that "Gatekeeping" (though that's a more recent word in the vernacular), but I think it's more 90% of the jobs were C/C++/Java back then, and a BS degree was meant to get a graduate in a job in the real world.
Also students dropping out of the computer science program wasn't a great look when requesting funds for servers and stuff.
All the OOP tricks, classes, instances, interfaces, polymorphism, its all good for wiring up your logic, replacing bits at runtime. No-one actually models their domain with pure OOP. Urgh, that would be awful.
But also to echo other commenters, this isn't interesting insight...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8420060
PS - don’t click the smashcompany link!!! The essay appears to have been replicated here:
https://medium.com/@jacobfriedman/object-oriented-programmin...
...how was this written in 2025? This is like mid-2000s edgelord stuff.
The interview question about static constructors and self-instantiating programs represents anti-patterns that professional OOP developers also avoid, not inherent OOP features. This is equivalent to judging FP by its worst callback-hell examples.
The ad hominem attack on prominent OOP authors doesn't improve the quality of the article, and dismissing patterns as "crutches" ignores that FP has equivalent patterns (monads, functors, lenses).
There is an enormous difference when mutability is opt-in.
Most OOP languages seem to require mutability, I'm not sure if there is a possibility to avoid it.
I guess elixir could count as oop, but not in the canonical terms, just according to Alan Kay definition
The problem with mutability by default is that immutability loses so many advantages...
edwinjm•2mo ago