"Nevertheless, I consider OOP as an aspect of programming in the large; that is, as an aspect that logically follows programming in the small and requires sound knowledge of procedural programming"
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Wirth is quietly drawing a boundary line that the software world still loves to blur: object-oriented programming is not a magical starting point, it is a scaling tactic. The phrasing "Nevertheless" signals an argument already in progress, a pushback against a rising orthodoxy. By the time OOP was being sold as a near-total paradigm shift, Wirth - architect of Pascal and a champion of disciplined, readable code - treats it as downstream infrastructure, not the source of truth.
"Programming in the large" versus "programming in the small" is doing the heavy lifting. The small is the unglamorous craft: control flow, data structures, correctness, and the ability to reason locally about what a program does. The large is architecture: modularity, interfaces, boundaries, and the social reality of teams maintaining code over years. Wirth's intent is corrective: OOP only pays off when it rests on solid procedural instincts, because most real bugs and most real complexity still live in the mechanics of execution.
The subtext is a warning against cargo-cult abstraction. Treat OOP as a religion and you get class hierarchies that model org charts, not reality; inheritance used to avoid thinking; polymorphism as a performance of sophistication. Wirth is also defending a pedagogy: teach people to write clear procedures before you hand them the power tools of encapsulation and late binding.
Context matters: coming from a scientist who prized simplicity and efficiency, this is less nostalgia than systems thinking. Paradigms are instruments, not identities; scale doesn't excuse sloppiness, it amplifies it.
"Programming in the large" versus "programming in the small" is doing the heavy lifting. The small is the unglamorous craft: control flow, data structures, correctness, and the ability to reason locally about what a program does. The large is architecture: modularity, interfaces, boundaries, and the social reality of teams maintaining code over years. Wirth's intent is corrective: OOP only pays off when it rests on solid procedural instincts, because most real bugs and most real complexity still live in the mechanics of execution.
The subtext is a warning against cargo-cult abstraction. Treat OOP as a religion and you get class hierarchies that model org charts, not reality; inheritance used to avoid thinking; polymorphism as a performance of sophistication. Wirth is also defending a pedagogy: teach people to write clear procedures before you hand them the power tools of encapsulation and late binding.
Context matters: coming from a scientist who prized simplicity and efficiency, this is less nostalgia than systems thinking. Paradigms are instruments, not identities; scale doesn't excuse sloppiness, it amplifies it.
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| Topic | Coding & Programming |
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