Review: What is Data Oriented Programming?

[Richard_Heller]

@didibus

I’d have to respectfully disagree. I think you’re doing an equivocation fallacy.

I would repectfully disagree with your respectful disagreement. The focus of OOP is on the data. It’s all about isolating changings and managing / controlling how data flows through the system. Do we need to call it Data Oriented? No, that would be redundant.

Why is it called Object Oriented? Because that’s how data is represented. Even the naming is all about the data. Functions are given a back seat to the data. The focus of FP is on the functions, with data being secondary.

How OOP goes about things may not be your cup of tea, which is fine, but it’s primary focus has always been on the data. The more a program focuses on data, the closer it gets to being OO.

@didibus

I think there is another criteria though, that of having a flexible enough set of data-structures that you can model your domain as closely as possible to its inherent structure.

What I mean by this is that, applying the Data Oriented style means that you fundamentally want your program’s domain model to reflect 1:1 with your domain’s way of modeling it.

@didibus

The way I personally distill what I’m calling Data-Oriented would be in being as truthful to the structure and operations of the real domain. When I think of data, I think of real world information. How can we take the real world information, and model it in our programs “AS-IS”. Similarly, how do we manipulate data in the real world? Can we similarly manipulate data in our programs? In the real world, you manipulate data in a very generic way, and “you” are the one that defines the invariants of your particular usage of said data.

I couldn’t have described the fundamental purpose of OOP any better if I tried. I’m actually getting a little teary eyed over here… Once it clicks how useful encapsulation and polymorphism really are, your journey to the dark side will be complete.