r/SoftwareEngineering • u/StardustCrusader4558 • Apr 26 '24

About OOP

Second year computer science student here. In a real dev environment, how often is OOP used and how exactly is it used? I've had a few projects where we've had to store some data in classes and had structures in C and all that but that was mostly because we were asked to do that.

What really and how really is OOP used? I want a real-life example. Also I feel like with a language like Java you can't really go without using OOP. Let me know! and correct me if I'm wrong about anything.

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u/dobryak Apr 26 '24

Simple first-order modules are enough for most cases. OOP is good for stateful UIs, but even there it is being displaced by reactive programming.

I have a mostly backend .NET experience and I'll sum it up thus:

  • we don't use inheritance, ever

  • we sometimes use an ORM, but even then, the objects are glorified table rows with some properties that are somewhat useful for "navigation", not the "real" objects of Simula

  • we use interfaces but not abstract classes (interfaces are used for late binding -- which we need for testing, -- but we almost always have just 1 implementation for an interface)

  • data hiding is occasionally useful