Comment by fidotron
9 months ago
It's not hard/fast but I would tend to agree with an approximation of this.
Back when I worked properly on big games the UI libs would often be trees of widgets with injectable functions for modifying the rendering, which is actually one of the points in this blog the writer would like. (The UI lib of classic Sims was exactly like that). These days the stuff I've done, although entirely in JS, at https://luduxia.com/ follows that pattern for the 3D components at least. The world is defined in an almost classic scene graph and then behaviour is added by attaching functions to pieces, which can be composed functionally.
Much of the anti-OOP noise is the result of people that have suffered from others creating hierarchies of the world too literally. Quite why it proves so difficult for developers to slow down and think about the right course of action is beyond me. They're also staggeringly resistant to changing afterwards.
>Much of the anti-OOP noise is the result of people that have suffered from others creating hierarchies of the world too literally.
I think one of the problems is that a heirarchy is inherently opinionated. You have to choose the criteria around how to group the objects/nodes in your graph and that criteria is context-dependent. The example I've used with animal taxonomy is grouping your objects via things you can eat vs things you can pat. Thsoe are two very different graph structures of the same group of objects and if you started with one then realized you need to change, how you use your objects you're gonna have a bad time. Multiple inheritance is the bandaid solution that usually comes with more hassle than it's worth.
Building a UI is a good example of a heirarchical structure where you know exactly how you want to use your objects and how they'll relate to each other, Not having access to that programming structure would be frustrating and just feel like a loss. But I've also done multiple large refactors of Python projects because I relied on OO inheritance models that turned out to not be quite the right implementation. In those situations, Rust traits are a breath of fresh air for offering the right kind of polymorphism.