We are replacing OOP with something worse

Summary

Many bytes have been spilled on the topic of object-oriented programming: What is it? Why is it? Is it good? I’m not sure I have the answers to these questions, but I have observed an interesting trend that I think has flown under the radar: OOP is not disappearing, but shifting across domains. Some quick and entirely incorrect history In times of old, people wrote programs. Things were easy and simple. Then, a manager that didn’t know how much trouble they were getting themselves into asked two programmers to work on the same program. Bad things happened. Some bright spark realised that bugs often appeared at the intersection of software functionality, and that it might be a sensible idea to perform a bit of invasive surgery and separate those functions with an interface: an at-least-vaguely specified contract describing the behaviour the two functions might expect from one-another. Other bright sparks jumped in on the action: what if this separation did not rely on the personal hygiene of the programmers - something that should always be called into question for public health reasons - and was instead enforced by the language? Components might hide their implementation by default and communicate only though a set of public functions, and the language might reject programs that tried to skip around these barricades. How quaint. Nowadays, we have a myriad of terms for these concepts, and others which followed in an attempt to further propagate the core idea: encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism. All have the goal of attenuation the information that might travel between components by force. This core idea isn’t unique to OOP, of course, but it is OOP that champions it and flies its coat of arms into battle with fervour. Programs-as-classes At around the same time, some bright spark realised that programmers - a population of people not known for good hygiene - might also not produce the most hygienic of programs, and that it was perhaps important not to trust all...