Cloud apps may not need OOP

The rise of different programming styles follows the need for program sizes.

The earliest programs were small -- tiny by today's standards. Most would fit on a single printed page; the largest took a few pages.

Programs larger than a few pages quickly became a tangled mess. Structured Programming (SP) was a reaction to the need for larger programs. It was a technique to organize code and allow programmers to quickly learn an existing system. With SP we saw languages that used structured techniques: Pascal and C became popular, and Fortran and BASIC changed to use the structured constructs IF-THEN-ELSE and DO-WHILE.

Structured Programming was able to organize code up to a point, but it could not manage the large systems of the 1990s. Object-oriented programming (OOP) was a reaction to the need for programs larger than several hundred printed pages. With OOP we saw languages that used object-oriented techniques: Java and C# became popular, C mutated into C++, and Pascal mutated into ObjectPascal. These new languages (and new versions of old languages) used the object-oriented constructs of encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism.

Cloud computing brings changes to programming, but in a new way. Instead of larger programs, cloud computing allows for (and encourages) smaller programs. The need for large, well-organized programs has been replaced by a need for well-organized systems of small programs. In addition, the needs placed on the small programs are different from the needs of the old, pre-cloud programs: cloud programs must be fast, replicable, and substitutable. The core idea of cloud computing is a that a number of servers are ready to respond to requests and that any server (of a given class) can handle your request -- you don't need a specific server.

In this environment, object-oriented programming is less useful. It requires some overhead -- for the design or programs and at run time. Its strength is to organize code for large programs, but it offers little for small programs. I expect that people will move away from OOP languages for cloud systems, and towards languages than emphasize readability and reliability.

I don't expect a renaissance of Structured Programming. I don't expect anyone to move back to the older SP-inspired languages of Pascal and Fortran-77. Cloud computing may be the technology that pushes us to move to the "Functional Programming" style. Look for cloud-based applications to use functional languages such as Haskell and Erlang. (Maybe F#, for Microsoft shops.)