What is Object-Oriented Programming? What are the four pillars of OOP and is OOP dead today? About Abstraction, Encapsulation, Inheritance & Polymorphism.
Is Object-Oriented Programming Dead?
Ever since Simula, the original object-oriented language, made its debut in Oslo in 1962, object-oriented programming (OOP) has been the go-to programming paradigm. In recent years, however, both functional and procedural programming have started to gather considerable momentum, gaining thousands of followers along the way and casting doubt on OOP’s continued relevance. Of course, when partnering with a web development company, it is important to ensure that they are proven experts in the field of programming. So should developers still use OOP today, or is object-oriented programming dead?
What Does OOP Mean?
Before moving forward, however, let’s begin with an important clarification: what exactly does OOP mean anyway? In broad terms, Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm – or style – which revolves around the idea of “objects” that can contain both data and code. While the data itself takes the form of fields (often known as attributes or properties), the code takes the shape of procedures (or methods). OOP is used to build applications using objects that can interact with one another. Although most popular programming languages today will enable OOP to varying degrees (including C++, Java, Python and others), they also tend to support other paradigms as well.
What Do You Mean by “OOP Paradigm”?
A programming paradigm is a means to categorise different programming languages based on a number of distinguishing factors. In the case of object-oriented programming — as highlighted above — we make use of the concept of “objects,” which alternatively may be described as metaphors for real-world scenarios.
For example, if a developer were to design a financial application, they could create a number of objects including “account,” “customer,” “transaction” and many others in a similar vein. As a result, they could break apart technical issues and describe them as you’d do so at work (e.g. “the customer is able to create a transaction and transfer money from one account to another”).
This greatly simplifies both development and communication, as even when software technicians are discussing the application, they can use domain-specific vocabulary that will illustrate exactly what they mean. It also improves code traceability and maintenance, enabling future teams to track the code down with ease.
The Four Pillars of OOP
The four pillars of OOP can help software engineers to create clean, object-oriented code. They are abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism.
What is abstraction in OOP?
In software development, abstraction means only showing the object user the information that they need to see. When switching on your mobile device, for instance, you most likely do not know the mechanism that led to the screen lighting up in the first place and you now being able to use it. Similarly, abstraction in OOP entails concealing the underlying implementation. A practical example would be to convert a string of code to lowercase by employing the .toLowerCase function. After all, we do not need to know how the language works – we only require the desired input.
Encapsulation in OOP
Encapsulation in OOP, on the other hand, is the process of combining data and methods into a single entity, such as a class. This means that the core operations of an object will be shielded from external code. In addition to simplifying code refactoring, encapsulation not only organises the code, but makes it easier for other programmers to understand it. More importantly, however, it also increases security by preventing changes to an object’s attributes and protecting them from unauthorised use.
What is inheritance in OOP?
Inheritance is yet another prominent concept in OOP. In essence, it refers to a method of building class hierarchies with a focus on code reusability. It is worth pointing out, however, that inheritance in OOP means only utilising the code and not upgrading it or modifying it at will. While classes that are derived from existing classes are called a subclass or child classes, the class from which a subclass is derived is either a superclass or parent class.
Polymorphism in OOP
Finally, as suggested by the term itself, Polymorphism in OOP concerns the data’s underlying capacity to be processed in more than one form. It is most commonly employed when a parent class reference is used to refer to a child class object. To illustrate this concept in layman’s terms, in the real world, any person can play multiple roles at the same time. You can be a husband, a father, a brother and a rocket scientist simultaneously.
Object-Oriented vs Functional: How does functional programming compare?
In stark contrast, functional programming (FP) treats code elements as mathematical equations — a somewhat colder approach, perhaps, but it is also undeniably efficient. In fact, many functional programmers believe FP can make testing, debugging, comprehension, and parallel programming more uncomplicated than ever. Even Agile legend Robert Martin has stated that it often results in safer solutions.
But is it strong enough to kill off OOP? Let’s go over object-oriented vs functional programming:
- Both functional programming and OOP languages strive to deliver error-free code that is intelligible, robust and manageable.
- Unlike OOP, functional programming means that data cannot be kept in objects, and can only be altered by writing functions.
- Attempting to maintain objects while raising the levels of inheritance is extremely difficult in object-oriented programming.
- Because in FP, every function requires a new object to be executed, applications require more memory to run.
Object-Oriented vs Procedural Programming
Lastly, procedural programming is a programming approach based on the concept of procedure calling. Procedures are often called routines, subroutines or functions, and are essentially a set of processes that need to be completed. When making the object-oriented vs procedural programming comparison, we can highlight the following differences:
- In procedural programming, both functions and the order of activities are given much more weight than data. By contrast, because it strives to mirror the actual world, OOP places more emphasis on data.
- Unlike procedural programming, which makes it challenging to add new data and functions, object-oriented programming actually makes it much easier to do so.
- The inheritance feature in OOP enables reutilising previous code. Procedural programming, on the other hand, sorely lacks such a capability.
Our Verdict: Not Dead by a Long Shot!
Though other paradigms have come a long way, with nearly every major programming language still based on object-oriented principles, despite anything you may hear to the contrary, OOP is still very much alive. Not only does it remain extremely useful today, but programming paradigms are not mutually exclusive, as it is actually perfectly possible to be a functional and object-oriented program.
More importantly, however, especially when partnering with a dedicated development team, you’d be hard-pressed to find a paradigm that can replace OOP entirely. So thank you, to the citizens of Norway, and long live object-oriented programming!
