if you have the time, a really good talk on the subject and history.

One example is creating an interface for every goddamn class I make because of “loose coupling” when in reality none of these classes are ever going to have an alternative implementation.

Sounds like you’ve learned the answer!

Virtual all programming principles like that should never be applied blindly in all situations. You basically need to develop taste through experience… and caring about code quality (lots of people have experience but don’t give a shit what they’re excreting).

Stuff like DRY and SOLID are guidelines not rules.

The principles are perfectly fine. It’s the mindless following of them that’s the problem.

Your take is the same take I see with every new generation of software engineers discovering that things like principles, patterns and ideas have nuance to them. Who when they see someone applying a particular pattern without nuance think that is what the pattern means.

I’m making a separate comment for this, but people saying “Liskov substitution principle” instead of “Behavioral subtyping” generally seem more interested in finding a set of rules to follow rather than exploring what makes those rules useful. (Context, the L in solid is “Liskov substitution principle.”) Barbra Liskov herself has said that the proper name for it would be behavioral subtyping.

In an interview in 2016, Liskov herself explains that what she presented in her keynote address was an “informal rule”, that Jeannette Wing later proposed that they “try to figure out precisely what this means”, which led to their joint publication [A behavioral notion of subtyping], and indeed that “technically, it’s called behavioral subtyping”.[5] During the interview, she does not use substitution terminology to discuss the concepts.

You can watch the video interview here. It’s less than five minutes. https://youtu.be/-Z-17h3jG0A

YAGNI ("you aren’t/ain’t gonna need it) is my response to making an interface for every single class. If and when we need one, we can extract an interface out. An exception to this is if I’m writing code that another team will use (as opposed to a web API) but like 99% of code I write only my team ever uses and doesn’t have any down stream dependencies.

My somewhat hot take is that design patterns and SOLID are just tools created to overcome the shortcomings of bad OOP languages.

When I use Rust, I don’t really think about design patterns or SOLID or anything like that. Sure, Rust has certain idiomatic patterns that are common in the ecosystem. But most of these patterns are very Rust-specific and come down to syntax rather than semantics. For instance the builder pattern, which is tbh also another tool to overcome one of Rust’s shortcomings (inability to create big structs easily and flexibly).

I think you’re completely correct that these things are dogma (or “circlejerking” if you prefer that term). Just be flexible and open minded in how you approach problems and try to go for the simplest solution that works. KISS and YAGNI are honestly much better principles to go by than SOLID or OOP design patterns.

99% of code is too complicated for what it does because of principles like SOLID, and because of OOP.

Algorithms can be complex, but the way a system is put together should never be complicated. Computers are incredibly stupid, and will always perform better on linear code that batches similar operations together, which is not so coincidentally also what we understand best.

Our main issue in this industry is not premature optimisation anymore, but premature and excessive abstraction.

The main thing you are missing is that “loose coupling” does not mean “create an interface”. You can have all concrete classes and loose coupling or all classes with interfaces and strong coupling. Coupling is not about your choice of implementation, but about which part does what.

If an interface simplifies your code, then use interfaces, if it doesn’t, don’t. The dogma of “use an interface everywhere” comes from people who saw good developers use interfaces to reduce coupling, while not understanding the context in which it was used, and then just thought “hey so interfaces reduce coupling I guess? Let’s mandate using it everywhere!”, which results in using interfaces where they aren’t needed, while not actually reducing coupling necessarily.

I think that OOP is most useful in two domains: Device drivers and graphical user interfaces. The Linux kernel is object-oriented.

OOP might also be useful in data structures. But you can as well think about them as “data structures with operations that keep invariants” (which is an older concept than OOP).

Also the more I get into languages like Rust, the more these doubts are increasing and leading me to believe that most of it is just dogma that has gone far beyond its initial motivations and goals and is now just a mindless OOP circlejerk.

There are definitely occasions when these principles do make sense, especially in an OOP environment, and they can also make some design patterns really satisfying and easy.

Congratulations. This is where you wind up, long after learning the basics and start interacting with lots of code in the wild. You are not alone.

Implementing things with pragmatism, when it comes to conventions and design patterns, is how it’s really done.

Two words: cargo cult.

I think the general path to enlightenment looks like this (in order of experience):

1. Learn about patterns and try to apply all of them all the time
2. Don’t use any patterns ever, and just go with a “lightweight architecture”
3. Realize that both extremes are wrong, and focus on finding appropriate middle ground in each situation using your past experiences (aka, be an engineer rather than a code monkey)

Eventually, you’ll end up “rediscovering” some parts of SOLID on your own, applying them appropriately, and not even realize it.

Generally, the larger the code base and/or team (which are usually correlated), the more that strict patterns and “best practices” can have a positive impact. Sometimes you need them because those patterns help wrangle complexity, other times it’s because they help limit the amount of damage incompetent teammates can do.

But regardless, I want to point something out:

the more these doubts are increasing and leading me to believe that most of it is just dogma that has gone far beyond its initial motivations and goals and is now just a mindless OOP circlejerk.

This attitude is a problem. It’s an attitude of ignorance, and it’s an easy hole to fall into, but difficult to get out of. Nobody is “circlejerking OOP”. You’re making up a strawman to disregard something you failed at (eg successful application of SOLID principles). Instead, perform some introspection and try to analyze why you didn’t like it without emotional language. Imagine you’re writing a postmortem for an audience of colleagues.

I’m not saying to use SOLID principles, but drop that attitude. You don’t want to end up like those annoying guys who discovered their first native programming language, followed a Vulkan tutorial, and now act like they’re on the forefront of human endeavor because they imported a GLTF model into their “game engine” using assimp…

A better attitude will make you a better engineer in the long run :)

OOP is good in a vacuum. In real life, where deadlines apply, you’re going to get some ugly stuff under the hood, even though the app or system seems to work.

One example is creating an interface for every goddamn class I make because of “loose coupling” when in reality none of these classes are ever going to have an alternative implementation.

That one is indeed objective horse shit. If your interface has only one implementation, it should not be an interface. That being said, a second implementation made for testing COUNTS as a second implementation, so context matters.

In general, I feel like OOP principals like are indeed used as dogma more often than not, in Java-land and .NET-land. There’s a lot of legacy applications out there run by folks who’ve either forgotten how to apply these principles soundly, or were never taught to in the first place. But I think it’s more of a general programming trend, than any problem with OOP or its ecosystems in particular. Betcha we see similar things with Rust, when it reaches the same age.

If it makes the code easier to maintain it’s good. If it doesn’t make the code easier to maintain it is bad.

Making interfaces for everything, or making getters and setters for everything, just in case you change something in the future makes the code harder to maintain.

This might make sense for a library, but it doesn’t make sense for application code that you can refactor at will. Even if you do have to change something and it means a refactor that touches a lot, it’ll still be a lot less work than bloating the entire codebase with needless indirections every day.