What is a modern language that comes close to embodying these ideals?
Alan Kay and OO Programming
81–90 of 141 posts
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#82What is a modern language that comes close to embodying these ideals?
Smalltalk comes to mind. You might argue over whether it counts as modern or not, but working in Smalltalk for two years was something of a revelation to me, at least.
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#83Great article. The idea that software should learn from billions of years of biological evolution is super interesting.
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#84What is a modern language that comes close to embodying these ideals?
Check out languages in the OTP ecosystem, especially Erlang and Elixir.
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#85>> 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 really don't agree with your point. The analogy Kay uses with biology is very telling : Cells (co-)evolved for billions of years, they were not "designed" to accomplish certain tasks. Just survival and reproduction. And still, even with those billion of years, we still have cancer (as in bug in the reproduction process). We design software. We evolve software. Software doesn't build itself, or decide for itself wha…
> Dynamic languages let you think a problem you haven't thought of at design time will somehow solve itself magically at runtime, using components designed weeks before, with knowledge of that time.
I don't think most people who program in dynamically typed languages believe that. However there are people in the extreme that believe that static typing will save you from errors. Sometimes I worry that the cognitive overhead of and code legibility, conciseness, and lax documentation that become habits in static typed languages add complexity to the program which is antithetical to maintainability. In practice, static typechecking of a dynamic language is probably enough. Especially erlang family languages do a great job of keeping type annotations looking "more like documentation" which is how it ought to be.
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
Yes so true
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#87>> 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…
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.
I don't know about integration testing, but it seems like that problem necessarily means important lower level tests are missing. Something like having a bunch of nested switch statements where some cases were left unhandled.
In that context, are integration tests checked automatically the same way, say, Rust would error out on unhandled cases? Or is this left up to developer (who I assume is always writing this stuff at the last possible moment with the least possible focus)?
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? Because we are? Have you seen most OOP code-bases, they are a train wreck!
JavaScript is functional and oh boy!
What does "functional" mean to you? If "OO" has a hundred different meanings, then "functional" must have at least a thousand. To me, JavaScript is definitely not functional - it lacks a notion of purity, and its meaning is the evaluation of statements, not the construction of expressions.
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#89>> 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…
> Why does the new generation so easily discard this vast amount of wisdom? If you are actually looking to have some input from people who prefer statically typed languages about their reasons, you might want to write your comment in a way that does not presuppose that these people are obviously wrong (and, apparently, unwise).
Indeed. Berating people is the worst form of advocacy.
Advocates of LISP and Smalltalk need to come up with reasons why their languages have not won the adoption wars that aren't "everyone else is an idiot" or "if only we told them the gospel they would convert".
(In fact, in some ways they've almost overwhelmingly won, it's just that those two particular languages didn't. The bulk of code today is written in the late-binding language Javascript, with its novel prototypical inheritance that enables run time patching. Lots of data is stored in JSON, which is a marginal improvement over S-expressions. Apple have people undramatically writing Objective-C, the Smalltalk inheritor. Perhaps the problem is not that they didn't win but that they aren't being hailed as heroes?)
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#90>> 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…
I don't have any particular love for dynamic typing, but I really can't find a language I like developing in more than Python. I use type hints wherever I can so I (and others) know what the hell is going on, but I have yet to find a language as expressive and productive with so many great stdlib or community packages as Python.
I started futzing with Golang but I felt like I was always typing 50 lines to do what I could in 3-4 in Python. I might circle back as it matures more and there are more libraries.