Practical uses of OOP

Question

I recently had a debate with a colleague who is not a fan of OOP. What took my attention was what he said:

"What's the point of doing my coding in objects? If it's reuse then I can just create a library and call whatever functions I need for whatever task is at hand. Do I need these concepts of polymorphism, inheritance, interfaces, patterns or whatever?"

We are in a small company developing small projects for e-commerce sites and real estate.

How can I take advantage of OOP in an "everyday, real-world" setup? Or was OOP really meant to solve complex problems and not intended for "everyday" development?

Answer 1

All programming paradigms have the same goal: hiding unneeded complexity.

Some problems are easily solved with an imperative paradigm, like your friend uses. Other problems are easily solved with an object-oriented paradigm. There are many other paradigms. The main ones (logic programming, functional programming, and imperative programming) are all equivalent to each other; object-oriented programming is usually thought as an extension to imperative programming.

Object-oriented programming is best used when the programmer is modeling items that are similar, but not the same. An imperative paradigm would put the different kinds of models into one function. An object-oriented paradigm separates the different kinds of models into different methods on related objects.

Your colleague seems to be stuck in one paradigm. Good luck.