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The illusion of simplicity: how OOP can overcomplicate simple problems
- Object-oriented programming (OOP) offers a toolkit designed to make developers’ lives easier but OOP has gained its fair share of critics who argue that the principles it upholds can often lead to overcomplication—especially when applied to simple problems.
- The illusion of simplicity in OOP begins to unravel when basic requirements evolve. This is because creating classes for every concept or behavior quickly results in a deep inheritance hierarchy.
- Encapsulation is another tenet of OOP that often contributes to this complexity. While encapsulation helps in hiding internal states and only exposing necessary details, enforcing this for simple problems can create a tangled mess of getters, setters, and boilerplate methods.
- In many cases, using an OOP approach to solve a simple problem can feel like over-engineering. If all you need is a script that calculates the sum of integers from 1 to 1000, writing a class named IntegerSummationService with multiple methods for "abstraction" is absurdly unnecessary.
- Functional programming (FP) has gained traction as an alternative to OOP precisely because of its emphasis on simplicity and immutability. FP offers the flexibility of defining isolated functions, leading to more straightforward code for many straightforward problems.
- Sometimes, basic procedural programming—writing simple scripts and functions—can be more than adequate. For tasks like file reading, processing CSVs, or generating reports, there's often no tangible benefit to wrapping the logic in classes or objects.
- Of course, there are situations where OOP shines. For large-scale systems with numerous entities and relationships—such as banking systems, e-commerce platforms, or content management systems—OOP can help manage the complexity effectively.
- As developers, we must remain adaptable, choosing the right paradigm based on the problem at hand rather than blindly adhering to OOP principles. The next time you’re about to design a new system or refactor an existing one, ask yourself: Is OOP truly the simplest solution?
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