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  • What does "orthogonal design" mean here? Wouldn't that just be polymorphism/strategy patterns again? Commented Mar 30, 2023 at 12:54
  • Don't forget that OO was conceived as a solution to improve maintainability of ever larger programs. That's why we keep types and operations on them together. I find myself programming poor man's OO even in non-OO plain old C: Yes, I want only initialized objects; yes, I want strong types (feet are not meters; I have different structs containing just one double each!); yes, I have tables with operations if necessary, emulating classes or even polymorphism. You can program a macro assembler, but you don't have to. Commented Mar 30, 2023 at 14:17
  • @Peter-ReinstateMonica that sounds like C++, with extra steps /s Commented Mar 30, 2023 at 14:19
  • @bracco23 Yes, of course! The gist of my comment was that I find myself employing the same techniques to cope with complexity in C that were incorporated in C++, for the same reasons. Commented Mar 30, 2023 at 15:19
  • @Peter-ReinstateMonica: OOP was advertised as a solution to improve maintainability of ever larger programs, but only partially fulfilled that promise. Of course, OOP means can indeed help to achieve this goal to some degree, but not automatically. You don't create a single-source-of-truth design just by using OOP means, you also have to use them well. Often, such design has nothing to do with OOP - it can actually start at the requirements level, by giving a user orthogonal configuration options, for example. Commented Mar 30, 2023 at 18:05