Pragmatism vs Idealism (DOD vs OOP)

So, it seems no blog these days is complete without a yet another stab at the DOD vs OOP argument.

Here's my take.

I could have picked any number of  dichotomy based titles for this post. Objective vs Subjective. Pragmatism vs Idealism. Design vs Performance. PC vs Console. There is a tendency to view DOD and OOP as somewhat polar extremes that you are either for, or against. Personally, I see merit in both camps. It is something of a false dichotomy. I see value in the ideals of OOP and DOD. Equally, I see shortcomings in both camps. For me, it's not an either/or, it's a question of how you blend them together.

For me, the real key issue is choosing what approach to adopt for a given task. This is where the real challenge lies.

The arguments used to support OOP are essentially based on intangible qualities. Design. Re-use. Extensibility. Maintainability. Elegance. Whilst valuable, these are generally somewhat subjective qualities. What constitutes good design is based on widely held best practices, and those practices are based on a consensus of constantly evolving expert opinion. It's very hard to measure these things explicitly. It's very hard to say how much "better" a more OOP centric approach can make a piece of code.

The arguments for DOD, by contrast, are based on real-world, objective data: performance. You can directly measure performance, and directly state the improvement that a DOD approach has yielded for a given task. Similarly, you can measure the cost of an OOP based approach in terms of lost performance. Performance has a useful, marginal benefit in a software project. Other qualities have their benefits but are frequently less directly felt.

You therefore end up with a challenging situation. How can the intangible qualities that support OOP argue against the real-world, objective data supporting DOD? How can we support OOP over DOD when it is based on subjective preferences, leading to design decisions that are somewhat arbitrary. Especially when you are trying to a ship a console game!

As I see it, the performance data that supports DOD should be supporting both arguments. The current generation of consoles in many ways are indicative of what future computing platforms will generally look like. Many cores. Slow memory. Long, simple instruction pipelines.

OOP has its positive qualities, but it is important to view it in context: it largely emerged as a means of improving the structure of large software systems by breaking software into singular, encapsulated objects. Whilst these concerns are significant, there are other, equally valid ways of addressing those concerns than OOP alone. And with the continuing, accelerating trend of parallel hardware, OOP alone cannot be positioned as the primary concern in designing software systems.

For me, my primary concern in software design is parallelism first, DOD second and OOP third.