Saturday, August 8, 2009

The limit of OOP Paradigm in really complex system?

Asked on Stack overflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1249426/the-limit-of-oop-paradigm-in-really-complex-system/1249463#1249463

I asked a question previously about Dataset vs Business Objects http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1248470/net-dataset-vs-business-object-why-the-debate-why-not-combine-the-two
and I want to generalize the question here: where is the proof that OOP is really suitable for very complex problems ? Let's take a MMO Game Engine for example. I'm not specialist at all but as I read this article, it clearly stands that OOP is far from being enough:
http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/11/11/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-2/
It concludes: Programming well with Entity Systems is very close to programming with a Relational Database. It would not be unreasonable to call ES’s a form of “Relation Oriented Programming”.
So isn't OOP trying to get rid off something that is here to stay ?
OOP is non-linear, Relational is linear, both are necessary depending on the part of a system so why try to eliminate Relational just because it isn't "pure" Object. Is OOP an end by itself ?

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My response:


There is really no limit to what OOP can deal with - just as there is no real limit to what C can deal with, or assembler for that matter. All are Turing-complete, which is all you really need.
OOP simply gives you a higher-level way of breaking down the program, just as C is a higher-level than assembler.
The article about entity systems does not say that OO cannot do this - in fact, it sounds like they are using OOP to implement their Entities, Components, etc. In any complex domain there will be different ways of breaking it down, and using OOP you can break it down to the object/class level at some point. This does not preclude having higher-level conceptual frameworks which are used to design the OOP system.

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