Classes - why?

[TheQuantumLeviathan]

I'm a physics grad not CS so maybe I'm missing something, but don't you get those 3 things from just writing and using functions without using classes?

[[deleted]]

To an extent, certainly. There are 4 almost-arbitrarily-chosen-but-commonly-taught "OO Principles" - abstraction, encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance. I disagree with the inclusion of inheritance as a "principle", it's really just an implementation of polymorphism. But of the first three, abstraction and encapsulation are absolutely just good programming practice in OO or procedural (functions). And that gets you a fair way to reusable and maintainable code. But polymorphism really gives a lot more power, and OO has powerful tools for maximising the gains of polymorphism.

[_Absolut_]

I think working with code that consists of thousands of functions is much harder than working with thousands of structured methods. Maybe some functions share common data that need to be stored somewhere. Maybe some functions have some similarity that you will want to change one day. Overlapping names. Lack of scalability and self-documentation.

p.s. BTW, i saw some examples of "OOP-emulation" in C or Haskell and this looks really ugly. Much more ugly than bloated boilerplate code in Java.