I don't quite understand what this is trying to say. It's a summary review of some reviews? Or something. It's not even clear if the author of this post agrees or disagrees with the claim in the YC News title. It's peppered with sentences like:

"That you don't understand something doesn't mean it's flawed or bad."

Precisely. Many of the arguments against OO are from academics that don't write real-world, large-scale software.

More arguments are from beginner programmers with a mere 2-5 years of experience that have never personally encountered the mess that programming at scale was before OO made it manageable.

Even more arguments are from people that assume that "precisely what language X happens to do" is exactly what OO is or isn't, and then argues from that straw man position.

Those same people then cheerfully embrace microservice or K8s, even though they are object-oriented! In case this is not clear, let me define OO for you:

"Object oriented design is all about encapsulated private state with abstract interfaces that have varying implementations that clients don't need to know the specifics of -- even the type names -- ahead of time."

Sounds like microservices? Or K8s? Or REST? Or service bus? Or event streams? Or any large-scale programming pattern? Yes. That's because abstract interfaces and decoupled components are critical to enabling large teams to collaborate on software too big to hold in the head of any one person.

OO is not intended to solve manager-human-employee-customer categorisations of real-world entities. That's a stupid straw-man argument born of toy textbook examples that aren't representative of real-world programs to begin with.

OO is intended to allow programming at the scale where simple procedural programming no longer works. I didn't understand the need for OO either until I worked at that scale myself. It seemed overcomplicated and unnecessary.

This is why it cracks me up to see language designers (and random Internet bloggers) talk about how "they don't need OO". Yes... you. Singular. One person doesn't ever need OO. Many people do. You're not many people!

Has anyone seen large scale development done successfully in an an "anti-OO" language like Rust? I haven't. The single largest codebase is probably Mozilla's Servo, which is still a toy compared to what's been written in C++ or Java! It was written by a few people, mostly in one building. Notably development of it slowed down and was abandoned. It was never shipped as intended.

How would you even envision a Rust project working with, say, 1000 developers? What happens when there's some new functionality added? Does developer #587 have to go notify the other 999 developers to update their switch statements, pattern matching code, etc... ?

Right now... generally speaking, yes. You'd have to go tell other people to go update their code. As you can imagine, 1000 developers telling 1000 developers to update things is a 1M-level organisational scaling problem.

That's why automated tooling was invented to handle this problem automatically, even at runtime, let alone compile time.

If you think automation is bad, then we no longer agree on the most basic concepts and this conversation is over.

If you have a better method for automating this problem, then I'd love to hear about it! Just make sure it's not OO with a different name...