   OOP is going down?
  So my professor of computer architecture just said something like this "It is very likely and probable that in the next few decade, OOP will be replaced by functional programming" the reason being is because of architectural improvements and the future of computer architecture. Now he is a very smart man, and I didn't have the time to ask questions, but what do you guys think about this?
  I for one do not believe that.  Seems that most architectures are moving more and more into object oriented models.  I would think that within the next few decades we may see functional programming fade from modern programming.  We may also see an upraise in static and singleton object use which may feel a little more functional, however I can not see any benefit of functional programming over object oriented programming for any practical use.   ; We may also see an upraise in static and singleton object use which may feel a little more functional, however I can not see any benefit of functional programming over object oriented programming for any practical use. <br /> <br />What do singleton objects have to do with functional programming? Are you sure you&#39;re not thinking of <a href='&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_programming&quot;'>procedural programming</a>?<br /> <br />Personally, I think functional programming will remain mostly in the academic world until some large corporation (probably several) pick it up. ;  If I had to guess he was saying this because of the trend towards very high core counts in modern CPUs. Intel just announced at least a 16 core cpu and maybe something even more ridiculous? The advantage of functional programming is that, I think, many (all?) functions don't have side effects so they can be easily parallelized.The obvious limiter to moving away from OOP is that we all super heart OOP because it's extremely intuitive. But, fundamentally it doesn't matter. You should know all kinds of programming anyway. And certainly if you hope to be employed after college, you'll need to know OOP -me   ;So my professor of computer architecture just said something like this "It is very likely and probable that in the next few decade, OOP will be replaced by functional programming" the reason being is because of architectural improvements and the future of computer architecture. Now he is a very smart man, and I didn't have the time to ask questions, but what do you guys think about this?I don't think that even makes sense anymore. Computer architecture? Isn't the compiler responsible for most of that work nowdays?   ;  It is very unlikely that functional programming (in its current state) will ever catch on. As Paladine mentions, pure functional languages offer the advantage of being dead simple to parallelize.There's two problems though with it gaining adoption:1. Momentum. Very few programmers know functional programming now. Very few existing programs are functional now. The grand mass of business isn't going to change in a decade to anything; let along something that... different.2. Weirdness. Speaking of which, the main reason functional programming will ever catch on is because it's hard for programmers to grok. People just don't think in the form of cascading functions and monadic transforms. Academics can usually manage it (which is why functional programming tends to be popular there). But your run of the mill app dev can barely understand Java, let alone something as demanding as Haskell. And they don't care about the parallelism benefits (because hardware is cheap/their apps aren't demanding) and they certainly don't care about the provability of programs.   ;  Why would the other fade away and other become big? Why can't functional and OOP coexist? Scala has both ways and it's awesome. Also functional programming doesn't take the hard part out of parallelizing. If you don't know how to make thread safe code in OOP then I doubt you could make it as a functional programmer(or you need to study more ). Threading issues come from accessing shared resources and operations that are dependent on each other. Functinal programming doesn't magically solve those.   ;  Many of the reasons why OOP is falling out of fashion (at least in games/HPC) is because of it's ignorance of performance issues and difficulty to parallelise (extensions such as message passing systems / the actor model help with parallelism though)See: Pitfalls of OOPHowever, as shown in the above source, this isn't a death-blow to OOP, as the issues can be overcome. What we're going to is is the internals of OOP systems be completely reinvented over the next 10 years.Same goes for functional programming languages, actually -- their internals will be re-written over the next decade to work even better on multi-core / NUMA computers.I don't think that even makes sense anymore. Computer architecture?  Isn't the compiler responsible for most of that work nowdays?If you've written code that assumes that there's one CPU and one big bank of virtual RAM, then, there's no way that a compiler can magically make your code work on a machine where there's one CPU with a large bank of ram, with serveral co-CPUs each with their own private RAM.i.e. architectural changes on the scale of NUMA require re-architecting of your code, not just recompiling with a new compiler.;  Machine->Assembly->C/C++->Managed languages. The trend in programming design is to make things easier. Your average joe programmer is not going to abandon simpler paradigms en masse to play amateur mathematician for some esoteric benefits. Maybe if it is somehow implemented as something the machine handles but I don't see most people wanting to deal with it directly.   ;Machine->Assembly->C/C++->Managed languages. The trend in programming design is to make things easier. Your average joe programmer is not going to abandon simpler paradigms en masse to play amateur mathematician for some esoteric benefits. Maybe if it is somehow implemented as something the machine handles but I don't see most people wanting to deal with it directly."Managed languages" includes both the OO paradigm and the Functional paradigm (e.g. C# vs F#)... So, I don't get what you're saying...   