What happened to OOP?

When recruiting engineers I always start with a discussion on object oriented programming. I try not to completely surprise the candidate, so I always list the four topics: abstraction, encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance. Then I ask the candidate to define each term, and tell me how (and why) it is used in real world situations.

I have to admit that I am amazed at the percentage of developers who do not know the fundamentals of OOP. Even developers coming right out of school struggle with this conversation. This despite the fact that most of our entry level developers are coming out of Masters of Computer Science programs.

It has caused me to wonder if OOP is coming out of favor. If this is the case, then what is replacing it? Gang of four patterns? Something else?

You can say I am an old school developer. I learned to code when the style was structured programming. There was no concept of OOP when I earned my Computer Science degree. I was introduced to OOP several years later, when building my first applications for Windows. I immediately saw the maintain beauty of maintaining a single piece of reusable code, this was a logical extension of function libraries.

OOP was a natural evolution of structured programming, and yet I was amazed at the number of my colleagues that did not make the switch. And those who didn't were relegated to mainframe jobs and maintenance of legacy system. The best engineering opportunities were given to those who were evangelists of object oriented programming.

But as Internet development took off during the first dot com boom, a couple of trends started. One was the adoption of Visual Basic, and the other was design patterns from the gang of four (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides).

In my mind, Visual Basic is and was a horrible trend in the practice of software development. The language, especially in its' early versions, encourage poor programming practices. And Microsoft's CASE style designer tools only exacerbated the problem. Departmental developers from corporations picked up the easy to learn language, and churned out applications that were impossible to maintain. Although recent versions of the Basic language implement OOP constructs, traditional VB developers generally do not use them.

Design patterns should have been an advancement in OOP development. In practical use, however, programmers often use patterns without practicing OOP themselves. Much the same way that procedural developers use Java or .Net and still fail to implement OOP.

The problem for me, as a manager and leader of engineering teams, is finding people who write code that is easy to maintain. To a degree, I equate maintainability with re-usability because code that is reused is not rewritten. And code that is reused is tested frequently. Coders that do not understand or practice disciplined OOP will fall into the copy-and-paste trap. When this happens, many versions of similar code appear throughout the source code, creating a maintenance nightmare.

The irony here is that descriptions of object oriented programming are very common. Wikipedia, for instance has an entry for OOP that a developer could review and understand in a couple of minutes. I hope too, that Computer Science programs strive to instill these basic concepts to their students. In the meantime I continue my search for solid OOP engineers who will help evolve our products.