by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-24 06:25:15+00:00
Unlearning object oriented programming

I think OOP became popular because it feels profound when you first grasp it. There is that euphoric moment when all the abstractions suddenly interlock, when inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation seem to dance together in perfect logic. It feels like you have entered a secret order of thinkers who understand something hidden. Each design pattern becomes a small enlightenment, a moment of realization that the system is clever in ways that ordinary code is not.

But if you step back far enough, the brilliance starts to look like ornament. Many of these patterns exist only to patch over the cracks in the paradigm itself. OOP is not a natural way of thinking, but a habit of thinking that bends reality into classes and hierarchies whether or not they belong there. It is not that OOP is wrong, but that it makes you mistake complexity for depth.

Then you encounter functional programming, and the same transformation begins again. It feels mind expanding at first, with the purity of immutable data, the beauty of composability, and the comfort of mathematical certainty. You trade one set of rituals for another: monads instead of patterns, recursion instead of loops, composition instead of inheritance. You feel that familiar rush of clarity, the sense that you have seen through the surface and reached the essence.

But this time the shift cuts deeper. The difference between the two paradigms is not just structural but philosophical. OOP organizes the world by binding behavior to state. A method belongs to an object, and that object carries with it an evolving identity. Once a method mutates state, it becomes tied to that state and to everything else that mutates it. The entire program becomes a web of hidden dependencies where touching one corner ripples through the whole. Over time you code yourself into a wall. Refactoring stops being a creative act and turns into damage control.

Functional programming severs that chain. It refuses to bind behavior to mutable state. Statelessness is its quiet revolution. It means that a function’s meaning depends only on its inputs and outputs. Nothing else. Such a function is predictable, transparent, and portable. It can be lifted out of one context and placed into another without consequence. The function becomes the fundamental atom of computation, the smallest truly modular unit in existence.

That changes everything. In functional programming, you stop thinking in terms of objects with responsibilities and start thinking in terms of transformations that can be freely composed. The program stops feeling like a fortress of interlocking rooms and begins to feel like a box of Lego bricks. Each function is a block, self-contained, perfectly shaped, designed to fit with others in infinitely many ways. You do not construct monoliths; you compose arrangements. When you need to change something, you do not tear down the wall. You simply reassemble the bricks into new forms.

This is the heart of functional nirvana: the dream of a codebase that can be reorganized endlessly without decay. Where every part is both independent and harmonious, where change feels like play instead of repair. Most programmers spend their careers trying to reach that state, that perfect organization where everything fits together, but OOP leads them into walls that cannot move. Functional programming leads them into open space, where everything can move.

Reality will always be mutable, but the beauty of functional programming is that it isolates that mutability at the edges. The pure core remains untouched, composed of functions that never lie and never change. Inside that core, every function is both a truth and a tool, as interchangeable as Lego bricks and as stable as mathematics.

So when we ask which paradigm handles complexity better, the answer becomes clear. OOP hides complexity behind walls. Functional programming dissolves it into parts so small and transparent that complexity itself becomes optional. The goal is not purity for its own sake, but freedom; the freedom to recompose, reorganize, and rethink without fear of collapse. That is the real enlightenment: when your code stops feeling like a structure you maintain and starts feeling like a universe you can endlessly reshape.