While this is true (and valid), there is something to be said about one of the worst abuses of OO, particularly among Java programmers....writing a getter/setter for every method to avoid making variables public. This is misguided.

private int foo;
public int getFoo() {
   return foo;
}
public void setFoo(int foo) {
   this.foo=foo;
}
[download]

In this case, the programmer thought that they were preventing access to an internal variable that should have been encapsulated, but they wrote methods that completely bypass that encapsulation. In this case (with no logic restricting input values), they have essentially made the "int foo" public, which is what they were avoiding in the first case. Also, this introduces greater overhead in calling additional functions.

I would much rather see OO folks think in terms of objects and have their methods have meanings, rather than to see them implement code as merely data structures with optional bounds checking behavior.

Essentally (and I am speaking in that accursed Java language):

Here the methods have meaning to the object

thing.move(+1,-1);

Here we just have a "objectified" data structure
and we aren't really OO

thing.setX(thing.getX()+1,thing.getY()-1)
[download]

So if you want to be all "Object Oriented", that's fine, but most most programs that declare them to be OO simply are not, they are just restricted data structures that are often 5x more complicated than they need to be. "Functions operating on Data" worked fine for many years and there is nothing wrong with it. For many programs, it's healthy to have a few objects mingling with non-OO constructs, since pure OO can really be detrimental in many cases. It can steamroll out of control (especially if you write a function for most variables!)

In fact, developing good data structures and programs are really a lost art, as many OO zealots can develop huge OO tree hierachies that obfuscate a lack of good up-front design. Sooner or later, a simple program that could have been written in a 1000 lines is now written in 1000 files!

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