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Alan Kay and OO Programming

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Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming

#51

Post by pleasecalllater »

jondubois wrote: post #37
pleasecalllater wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Focusing on integration tests: oh, the test fails, something is wrong somewhere... I will debug all layers for the next week, as we simply don't have too many tests covering the internal code. I like to have both.

Why next week? Why not use the integration tests as part of your debug cycle now? The kinds of integration tests that I write only take a few milliseconds to run so if they fail I can just make a code change (or add a new breakpoint or log), then run again, then repeat. The flow should not be any different from doing TDD with unit tests. Note that integration tests don't necessarily have to be end-to-end; the point i…

Not "the next week" but "for the next week". My experience shows that debugging pure integration test systems is really time consuming.

Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming

#52

Post by LandR »

enriquto wrote: post #19
warent wrote: post #2

I have a ton of respect for Alan Kay and think he's a genius. But why does it seem like every time he talks about OO it's always painting an apocalyptic picture like we're in some kind of twilight zone alternate nightmare reality of broken patterns and models? Surely our concept of objects and OOD can't be that bad, but his apparently contrary outlook is just so persistent...

> Surely our concept of objects and OOD can't be that bad Yes, it is. Object orientation is probably the worst idea to ever have appeared in computer science, both from a philosophical and practical point of view: it is an unsound principle and it leads to disastrous engineering practices. We will be mocked mercilessly by our descendants.

Yeah, history won't be kind to OOP and OOD.

It will go down as a massive mistake that costs billions in both financial cost and just wasted human effort.

Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming

#53

Post by cbdumas »

cryptica wrote: post #21

>> Extreme late-binding is important because Kay argues that it permits you to not commit too early to the "one true way" of solving an issue (and thus makes it easier to change those decisions), but can also allow you to build systems that you can change while they are still running! >> Binding can also refer to binding a variable type to data. As someone who has over 15 years of experience going back and forth betw…

> Many of the people who came up with or promoted the idea of dynamically typed languages had decades of experience working with punchcards, assembly code and statically typed languages

The problem IMO is that the languages used at that time mostly had ad hoc, poorly specified, unsound type systems. I find that more "modern" type systems are helpful rather than burdensome, but the theoretical foundation for them didn't really exist until the 70s.

Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming

#54

Post by mpweiher »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #9
kstenerud wrote: post #3

I'm not sure I understand why late binding and Alan Kay style messaging is desirable. If you send a message to something that's supposed to do a task, and it just ignores your message because it was the wrong type or whatever, how are you supposed to debug that, or reason about the correctness of your program at all?

All apple software use objective c and seems fine. Run time checking is not unreal. Internet run on that. Ethernet run on that. Too much error correction like sna and token ring make the network brittle. You think you help error handling but by enforcing failure you have not decouple the “objects”. By assuming type and minor change the whole thing collapse on you. It is between ibm network and internet. Or osi vs iet…

> objc - fine

People forget this, particularly the ones who claim "this can't possibly work". If that's your position, you are simply wrong. Now which works better in what ways is something we can talk about.

> Internet

This is another big one people seem to not think about. Kay was thinking about scaling up, or rather about taking an idea that can scale up and then scaling it down. The internet and the WWW clearly demonstrate that you must late-bind. In fact, Allen Wirfs-Brock noted how the Internet is a lot like a huge distributed Smalltalk image: it runs all the time, it's late-bound, it's very stateful and you can't take it down and restart it from scratch.

Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming

#55

Post by 0x445442 »

armitron wrote: post #48
jompe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fresh graduate from uni so I'd say that I don't have that much experience. My last years working on the side of studies using Python really made me prefer strongly typed languages like Haskell, Rust, Elm etc. My experience is that the compiler almost always finds my small errors and would-be-bugs which Python exposes at runtime (crashes with e.g. None-type errors). What would you say the benefits are with dynam…

The article explains (very well) what the benefits of dynamic typing are, it's just that Python is a terrible language that spits in the face of Alan Kay's ideas. It's like someone went out of their way to create a language that would not be too paradigm shifting by discarding the crucial elements that Alan Kay keeps raving about and only choosing the most superficial with the only consideration being ease of use and…

I wouldn't say current Smalltalk implementations mesh perfectly with Kay's vision. It's focus on class hierarchies and inheritance breaks with what Kay's initial vision was. That said, it's possible to write Smalltalk code favoring composition over inheritance or in a much more functional way that focuses on messages.

Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming

#56

Post by dec0dedab0de »

jompe wrote: post #29
cryptica wrote: post #21

>> Extreme late-binding is important because Kay argues that it permits you to not commit too early to the "one true way" of solving an issue (and thus makes it easier to change those decisions), but can also allow you to build systems that you can change while they are still running! >> Binding can also refer to binding a variable type to data. As someone who has over 15 years of experience going back and forth betw…

I'm a fresh graduate from uni so I'd say that I don't have that much experience. My last years working on the side of studies using Python really made me prefer strongly typed languages like Haskell, Rust, Elm etc. My experience is that the compiler almost always finds my small errors and would-be-bugs which Python exposes at runtime (crashes with e.g. None-type errors). What would you say the benefits are with dynam…

Python IS strongly typed. ie: 1 == '1' is FALSE, and 2 + '2' raises an exception.

Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming

#57

Post by armitron »

cryptica wrote: post #21

>> Extreme late-binding is important because Kay argues that it permits you to not commit too early to the "one true way" of solving an issue (and thus makes it easier to change those decisions), but can also allow you to build systems that you can change while they are still running! >> Binding can also refer to binding a variable type to data. As someone who has over 15 years of experience going back and forth betw…

We need to acknowledge that this particular field of, let's be generous and call it engineering, we are talking about is, for the most part, slow-moving and rather backwards to begin with. It's also shaped by forces and concerns that are suboptimal. As I wrote in the past:

"Software Engineering must be the only engineering discipline where mastery of tools and barrier to entry in terms of skills are in many ways inversely correlated with market demands. Every clown can write software these days and in fact a lot of clowns get paid six figure salaries to do so. When the domain is largely composed of clowns, standards become extinct and one finds oneself calibrating for a circus."

This is very important when we think about certain ideas expressed by geniuses that are so far ahead of their time that even smart people don't understand them. Unfortunately this seems to have happened to Alan Kay and his ideas. Maybe in 50 or 100 years, the modern software engineering race-to-the-bottom culture will have evolved enough (or more realistically, either exhausted dead-end paradigms or slammed into one unfathomable disaster or another) to appreciate them.

Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming

#58

Post by Fellshard »

jasode wrote: post #18

>, he realized that while software routinely has trouble scaling, cells can easily coordinate and scale by a factor of over a trillion, creating some of the most fantastically complex things in existence, capable of correcting their own errors. By comparison, the most sophisticated computer software programs are slow, tiny, bugfests. Kay's conception of OOP starts with a single question: how can we get our software t…

This is one of the arguments for microservices and the tooling around them: microservices act as the new 'objects' given this perspective.

Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming

#59

Post by kstenerud »

eternalban wrote: post #32
kstenerud wrote: post #3

I'm not sure I understand why late binding and Alan Kay style messaging is desirable. If you send a message to something that's supposed to do a task, and it just ignores your message because it was the wrong type or whatever, how are you supposed to debug that, or reason about the correctness of your program at all?

Have successfully completed tasks call home to mama. No call no work. Easy. Alan Kay and fellow minded et al. are looking at Biology and to an extent Physics as the successful approach to pervasive computation at large . It is the desirable feature set of the biological organism that informs that perspective: self-healing, self-regulating, regenerative systems operating in an open-ended operational context. So that i…

Biological systems do that because they evolve. Interactions between independent systems happen due to chance changes in some of them. But the nature of the interaction is not something controlled. Switch one bit of a genetic code and a whole bunch of behaviors change (the ultimate in side effects). This is the anti-Dijkstra; a system that cannot be fully reasoned about.

What we're seeing in "successful" biological systems is survivorship bias. They are useful because the system they operate in happens to be such that their function is useful to the system (they are in a temporary equilibrium). And that system is not under anyone's control, nor can it be, because every tiny change in one component, or the environment they operate in, alters that equilibrium in ways we can't predict. But there's no controlling entity pushing biology towards a particular function, so this doesn't matter in nature.

A computer system modeled after this would be by nature difficult to fathom and brittle to change.

Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming

#60

Post by ladyattis »

cryptica wrote: post #21

>> Extreme late-binding is important because Kay argues that it permits you to not commit too early to the "one true way" of solving an issue (and thus makes it easier to change those decisions), but can also allow you to build systems that you can change while they are still running! >> Binding can also refer to binding a variable type to data. As someone who has over 15 years of experience going back and forth betw…

I've always been on the fence with respect to dynamic versus static typing. In some cases, static typing is nice but the majority of my issues don't rise from such cases where data passed in don't match the type of a function or class. I've noticed this quite a bit in my toy projects with Racket and Common Lisp. I think static typing might have its uses in places where you want to ensure the numeric values are within a range but one can argue that the compiler or runtime system should be competent enough to make arbitrarily large numbers acceptable even if they're rare in execution. But for all others, I think one can ignore types unless the former situation affects your work.
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