Object-Oriented Programming is The Biggest Mistake of Computer Science

Elliot Suzdalnitski
17 min readJan 4, 2021

C++ and Java probably are some of the worst mistakes of computer science. Both have been heavily criticized by Alan Kay, the creator of OOP himself, and many other prominent computer scientists. Yet C++ and Java paved the way for the most notorious programming paradigm — the modern OOP.

Its popularity is very unfortunate, it has caused tremendous damage to the modern economy, causing indirect losses of trillions upon trillions of dollars. Thousands of human lives have been lost as a result of OOP. There’s no industry that went untouched by the latent OO crisis, unfolding right before our eyes for the past three decades.

Why is OOP so dangerous? Let’s find out.

Photo by Gabriel Hohol from Pexels

Imagine taking your family out for a ride on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. It is nice and sunny outside. All of you enter the car, and you take the exact same highway that you’ve already driven on a million times.

Yet this time something is different — the car keeps accelerating uncontrollably, even when you release the gas pedal. Brakes aren’t working either, it seems they’ve lost their power. In a desperate attempt to save…

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