C++ Was a Joke

[Garth Wilson]

On another forum I'm on, there was a volley of posts between two professional programmers who had both been using OOP in their work for 15+ years, one of them saying it was ill-conceived, that no one thought in terms of objects, etc., while the other one was saying that he definitely does think in terms of objects and OOP has its place, which apparently is for GUIs and plug-ins, something whose insides I'm not the least bit familliar with. I do a fair amount of programming of microcontrollers for embedded applications where the microcontroller will never run anyone's code but mine, and I don't touch graphics. I've read various descriptions for what the parts of OOP are, watched YouTube videos on OOP, and none of it has ever really made any sense to me, at least as presented.

A nephew who's majoring in CS said, "If you're defining a car for example, you don't want to have to define a wheel four times. You make it a re-usable object." My immediate response was that there were subroutines decades before OOP, and, although you might have different kinds of wheels in something so you can't just use the same one for everything--for example, although they are all round and turn on their axis, they will have different diameters and other attributes--I do that kind of thing with macros all the time, not OOP. After all the reading though, I do suspect I've done a little OOP in Forth without knowing it.