171–180 of 396 posts
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Ah, so you have evidence that it was somebody else?
I don't, but that's not how the burden of proof works.
You are now making an affirmative assertion that Alan Kay did not coin the term. The burden of proof is on you, not him.
Likewise I've also had to deal with a 'big ball of structured programming spaghetti'.
My take on the difference in these two types of systems is they are generally the result of too much coding with too little design.
Personally, I think the OOP approach does have a tendency to turn into that spaghetti ball more easily, only because it needs more up front design.
Most of places I've worked who adopted an OO approach have tended to focus predominantly on the OOP with little or no attention to the OOD and that tends to be a recipe for disaster.
Object oriented programming isn't about an individual programmer. It's about creating discrete APIs so that a bunch of different programmers can work on different aspects or sections of code. It's an organizing principle for discrete elements that encapsulates internal state. You don't need to know your datastore is SQL or Redis, or Redis caching SQL data, or marshalled JSON, you just call Users.getUser(id), and get…
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Isn't a method call a message, and the return value a message back? Or is it that "true OO" must be asynchronous?
> Isn't a method call a message, and the return value a message back? 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 b…
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I don’t think I’ve ever seen a useful “Getter” abstraction...
It's frustrating to read this thread and your comment kind of crystallized this for me so I'll respond to you. Using an array without having to (manually) calculate the size of the objects contained within is like the major triumph of OO. This is a getter that you almost certainly use constantly. Please try to consider your statements and potential counter factuals before spraying nonsense into the void
I've used arrays in countless OO and non-OO programming languages, and I do not recall ever having to manually calculate the size of objects contained therein – what are you talking about? Only C requires crap like that, but precisely because it doesn't have first class arrays.
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I don't, but that's not how the burden of proof works.
Every source I've ever come across on this topic (and I work in PL research) points to Kay as the originator of the term "object-oriented" in relation to programming. No exceptions. You are now making an affirmative assertion that Alan Kay did not coin the term. The burden of proof is on you, not him.
You make the claim he coined the term, the burden of proof is on you.
Until you do, it's perfectly reasonable and intellectually honest to reject that claim.
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?
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OO is the worst programming paradigm in the world except for all the others.
Admittedly I'm somewhat of a FP fanboy, but I seriously cannot disagree with you more on this. Functional Programming (and Logic Programming) are better than other paradigms because, unlike Java (or C++, or C#...) there is an emphasis on correctness , and the people working on FP compilers (like Haskell and Idris) are utilizing mathematics to do this. No idea on your opinion on mathematics, but to me Math/Logic reign…
I had this experience once in a Rails shop.
A simple database table mapped to a CRUD API endpoint would take from five to ten files. That amounted to about 500 lines, plus a lot of tests for each class.
I never really understood why programming became so verbose. In an ideal world I'd have a declarative API that mapped the table to the API for me automatically. In a realistic timeline I'd just use the traditional Rails approach and be happy. But the people working there preferred to use complicated patterns and a lot of boilerplate before they were needed, even though the project was perpetually late and riddled with bugs. I wish we could give a chance to simpler ways of solving problems.
Everything sucks, they just all suck differently. I still think OO provides a pretty easy mental framework for programming. You can get good results. Bit of discipline without going crazy and it works really effectively. Despite its shortcomings.
Agreed. I remember thinking "what don't I get? Why do we need getters and setters?". After some years (and discovering Python), I realized there's nothing to get, it's just ridiculous overengineering 95% of the time. Same goes for a lot of stuff in OO. I attribute it to the corporate mindset it seems to thrive in, but I could be wrong.
I think this article is quite old, so I can forgive the author for being out of touch with modern OO language practices. Nonetheless, I find myself disagreeing with almost all of his arguments. When he talks about state for example, I assume he means mutable state. Everyone knows this is best avoided if possible. The vast majority of OO languages provide mechanisms to avoid mutability e.g. data classes or keywords to…
What do you do with values that can't be meaningfully hashed/compared? Java is the only place I've come across this odd idea that everything is hashable, and I've never thought of it as a positive thing.