Alan Kay and OO Programming
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Alan Kay and OO Programming
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Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#2I 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...
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#3I'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?
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#4I 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...
> 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!
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#5I 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...
> 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!
This
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#6I 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
How would you know if it were?
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#7Objective c is better in this respect. It is more about message passing than type enforcement.
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#8I'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?
Sending messages asychronously and not knowing who (or even if anyone) will handle it is pretty desirable. Like a holy grail of writing maintainable software. (think of async communication via a queue)
Isn't always possible, but it's worth the constant vigilance to drive each feature towards that type of architecture.
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#9I'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 ietf.
Re: Alan Kay and OO Programming
#10I'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?
Sending messages asychronously and not knowing who (or even if anyone) will handle it is pretty desirable. Like a holy grail of writing maintainable software. (think of async communication via a queue) Isn't always possible, but it's worth the constant vigilance to drive each feature towards that type of architecture.
OK, I must be missing something fundamental, then.
Let's say you want to take payment and ship a product. You send a message that payment of X is needed. And... nothing happens because the component that handles that isn't listening for whatever reason. Do you wait for a message saying payment was posted? How long do you wait? What about the UI? How long does the customer wait?
It seems like a messaging system like this would require all calling components to micro-manage anything they're calling, to make sure things actually get done...