141–150 of 396 posts
> In an OOPL I have to choose some base object in which I will define the ubiquitous data structure. All other objects that want to use this data structure must inherit this object. So... that's not actually how it works though, right?
It really should be noted that years later Joe changed his mind about OO and came to the realization that perhaps Erlang is the only object-oriented language :) From a 2010 interview: ..."I wrote a an article, a blog thing, years ago - Why object oriented programming is silly. I mainly wanted to provoke people with it. They had a quite interesting response to that and I managed to annoy a lot of people, which was par…
Both Alan Kay and Joe Armstrong struck me as having had the same attitude of trying to capitalize on the topic of object oriented programming, failing to recognize its importance, and then later trying to appropriate it by redefining it. Not the best moment of these otherwise two bright minds.
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Didn’t Alan Kay coin the term “object oriented”?
That's what he claims but there's zero evidence besides his own word.
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Maybe because no body had commented as such until now? I am rather practical about this: I don't really like Java because it forces things that make more sense as functions to be under an object. What if I just want a simple global utility function, and don't want to make every single class inherit from a class containing only that? It's a lot of unnecessary hassle for something like that. I'm not saying OO is bad, I…
and don't want to make every single class inherit from a class containing only that That's not how having a global utility function works in any OO language I can think of.
Well, I disagree with 99% of this... I'm a guy that started with C, moved to functional programing, added C++, and now do all 3. > Objection 1. Data structure and functions should not be bound together Well, in my experience, in every almost every code-base (either from functional, or imperative programing), we end up with modules, witch are a set of function taking the same type as a parameter. This is very close to…
Wouldn't this violate the "encapsulation" pillar of OOP? As far as I know, it's always taught with encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism being its three pillars.
> How has OOP created a software industry that would not have existed if functional programing had "won the fight"?
I'm not sure functional programming has lost yet. I haven't worked with it personally, and so can't speak to its merits or demerits, but have heard a lot of buzz around it recently. As you said, people tend to hype everything; some stay and some go. It might be the next big thing in programming, or it might be hipster tech. Or, like most things, it might have some good applications, but not be applicable to everything. That's basically my argument for OOP.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both Alan Kay and Joe Armstrong struck me as having had the same attitude of trying to capitalize on the topic of object oriented programming, failing to recognize its importance, and then later trying to appropriate it by redefining it. Not the best moment of these otherwise two bright minds.
I'd be really interested to hear what you think they missed, because I find your claim to be surprising and a bit preposterous.
It really should be noted that years later Joe changed his mind about OO and came to the realization that perhaps Erlang is the only object-oriented language :) From a 2010 interview: ..."I wrote a an article, a blog thing, years ago - Why object oriented programming is silly. I mainly wanted to provoke people with it. They had a quite interesting response to that and I managed to annoy a lot of people, which was par…
Isn't a method call a message, and the return value a message back? Or is it that "true OO" must be asynchronous?
Getters/setters are technically message-passing methods, but they undermine the design goal because they more or less directly expose internal state to the public world.
But we see getters/setters used constantly. People don't use OO in the way Kay intended. Yes, methods are the implementation of the whole "message passing" thing Kay was talking about, but we see them used in ways he did not intend.
It really should be noted that years later Joe changed his mind about OO and came to the realization that perhaps Erlang is the only object-oriented language :) From a 2010 interview: ..."I wrote a an article, a blog thing, years ago - Why object oriented programming is silly. I mainly wanted to provoke people with it. They had a quite interesting response to that and I managed to annoy a lot of people, which was par…
Isn't a method call a message, and the return value a message back? Or is it that "true OO" must be asynchronous?
It is!
In my view, the point that Alan Kay and Joe Armstrong are trying to make is that languages like C++/Java/C# etc have very limited message passing abilities.
Alan Kay uses the term "late binding". In Kay's opinion, "extreme late binding" is one of the most important aspects of his OOP [1], even more important than polymorphism. Extreme late binding basically means letting the object decide what it's gonna do with a message.
This is what languages like Objective-C and Ruby do: deciding what to do after a method is dispatched always happen during runtime. You can send a message that does not exist and have the class answer to it (method_missing in Ruby); you can send a message to an invalid object and it will respond with nil (Objective-C, IIRC); you can delegate everything but some messages to a third object; you can even send a message to a class running in other computer (CORBA, DCOM).
In C++, for example, the only kind of late binding that you have is abstract classes and vtables.
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> Or is it that "true OO" must be asynchronous?
It doesn't have to be asynchronous, but in Alan Kay's world, the asynchronous part of messaging part should be handled by that "dispatcher", rather than putting extra code in the sender or the receiver.
I don't remember Alan Kay elaborating on it, but he discusses a bit about this "interstitial" part of OOP systems in [2]
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