Does OO sync with how we think?

Abstract

Of the many revolutions that have captured the hearts of programmers, object orientation has been arguably the most forceful and alluring. Central to the paradigm is that it matches how we think about the world and therefore self-evidently points the way for all future development. Given that corrective-maintenance costs already dominate the software life cycle and look set to increase significantly, I argue that reliability in the form of reducing such costs is the most important software improvement goal. Yet, as I will show, the results are not promising when we review recent corrective-maintenance data for big systems in general and for OO systems, in this case written in C++. I assert that any paradigm that is capable of decomposing a system into large numbers of small components - as frequently occurs in both OO and conventional systems - is fundamentally wrong. Thus, because both paradigms suffer from this flaw, we should expect no particular benefits to accrue from an OO system over a non-OO system. Further, a detailed comparison of OO programming and the human thought processes involved in short- and long-term memory suggests that OO aligns with human thinking limitations indifferently at best. In the case studies I describe, OO is no more than a different paradigm, and emphatically not a better one, although it is not possible to apportion blame between the OO paradigm itself and its C++implementation.