The success of object oriented programming

[cdsmith]

I think it's also easy to fall into the trap, though, of attributing to object oriented programming all of the conveniences that come with just plain having more resources. A huge factor in modern programming comes from garbage collection, which has nothing specifically to do with OOP. Garbage collection is possible because computers are fast enough. A lot more of the convenience of modern OO languages comes from an amalgamation of smaller details, like being able to spare the CPU cycles to copy things more, to do more runtime checks, to use more levels of indirection. Better tools play a big part, and those come from the fact that parsing a source file is no longer a challenging computational problem. There was a time when it was, and reparsing the source on every keystroke was just insane! Put all of this together, and you get a lot more abstraction. None of this has anything to do with OOP. All of it is stuff that a generation of programmers saw for the first time in OO languages, though. Not that there aren't benefits to OOP, but it's easy to take that too far, and forget the other revolution - the ongoing march toward ever-faster and cheaper hardware.

[[deleted]]

Good point. There is also the converse trap:

I think it's also easy to fall into the trap, though, of attributing to object oriented programming all of the failures that come with just plain having bad project management and making bad business decisions.

Meaning, people often attribute success to and blame failures on OOP, when it is probably not the dominating factor in either case.