Data-Oriented Programming

What Hacker News says

1. ossm1dbMay 2025
   DDD is just the beginning. A successful architecture for AI app generation will apply DDD using data-context-iteraction (DCI) in conjunction with Data-Oriented Programming as described by Yehonathan Sharvit: https://blog.klipse.tech/dop/2022/06/22/principles-of-dop.ht... Note that the "DOP" espoused by Brian Goetz and others complicates AI app generation. It stipulates strong typing, that when combined with "making illegal states unrepresentable" (a concept borrowed from functional programming), makes change -- which is inevitable -- more difficult.
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2. markcOct 2024
   >The book itself uses Java, not Clojure.

   Almost all of the code examples in the book are in JavaScript (not Java) though a significant feature of Sharvit's approach is that it decouples Data Oriented Programming from any specific language. As a Clojure geek, I highly recommend the book as the way to achieve some of Clojure's core virtues in other languages.

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3. so-cal-schemerJun 2026
   See also:

   Data-Oriented Programming: Reduce software complexity

   by Yehonathan Sharvit

   https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming

   and from SICP:

   2.4.3 Data-Directed Programming and Additivity

   https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/2_002e4.xhtml#g_t2_00...

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4. LesZedCBDec 2023
   Yehonathan Sharvit wrote a post describing the difference between Data-Oriented Programming, Data-Oriented Design, and Data-Driven Design here. it's a 2 minute read or 15 second skim, very brief.

   https://blog.klipse.tech/visualization/2021/02/16/data-relat...

   it includes a nice summary of all of the above which may help when reading the OP.

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5. turtleyachtApr 2023
   Not just another discussion on programming style, but program development, with a focus on data.

   I like the idea of having models and enforcing themselves. For example, testing that three different API endpoints of a service match each other's idea of their objects. This is a sanity check when we verify the frontend state.

   If we could separate scraping from modeling constraints, we could potentially collect data separately from the verification step. Then we aren't left waiting for UI DOM stuff when we verify the model. The latter can happen separately, and extremely quickly.

   See also

   Data-Oriented Programming. Sharvit, Yehonathan. Manning 2022.

   Principles of Program Design. M.A. Jackson. 1975.

   SAM Pattern. Jean-Jacques Dubray. https://sam.js.org/

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6. KrugerDunningsFeb 2023
   One such "implementation language" as you call it is data-oriented programming (not to be confused with data-oriented design, which is used in game development and sort of has the same idea but different). DOP is build around the idea that your data object are just hashmaps and that you don't translate them to "real" objects. Like a record from a database or the response of a REST API is just a hashmap. Then you just have a transformations between these objects. The idea sort of sounds horrible because you are told not to do this but when done "the right way" it is a very flexible way to organise application. I think typescript can help with its opt-in approach to typing. Clojure has also explored much of the same idea and has optimised data structures for this. Yehonathan Sharvit has given some interesting talks about this and published a book about it[1][2].

   Anyway I thought it was sort of ironic that the idea is this good because it does the thing everyone tells you not to do (hashmap all the things), but now that someone has written a book on it you have at least the air of respectability.

   [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz9rkr_p3Ts [2] https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming

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