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Voted this up out of pure nostalgia. I remember the "spirited" usenet discussions we had with topmind/tablizer on comp.object. He was a one-man army fighting pr

Voted this up out of pure nostalgia. I remember the "spirited" usenet discussions we had with topmind/tablizer on comp.object. He was a one-man army fighting proponents of OO. There were actually some decent ideas buried in his ramblings about table-oriented programming but he was so abrasive nobody could deal with him. I'd be curious what became of him...

jvoorhis 10y ago
When I saw the headline I immediately thought of http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TopMind http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TopMind
- dri_ft 10y ago
  Me too. I binged a lot of the C2 wiki last year and waded through a lot of his spew.
- rosege 10y ago
  My first thought was, sharing is tables
to3m 10y ago
I remember him from the late 1990s, I think. One of the various usenet weirdos I have somewhat fond memories of reading at the time. "Wow, who the hell were those freaks", I'd think, as I left a computer room at university, blinking at the sunlight (since the room I'd usually go to, on account of its good-sized set of underused HP9000s, had slightly dim lighting and zero windows), having just spent half a day of one of what would have been potentially the better years of my life reading what these people had to say. How could they find the time, I'd wonder. Didn't they have anything better to do? ;) Still fascinating though. Usenet was like a crash course in seeing how people can be dicks. Still can't decide whether I regret it or not.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  By late 90s, eternal september had set in. Meaning that anyone with AOL access could access usenet. the net has likely never recovered.
  - baldfat 10y ago
    I REMEMBER THAT. I was in my early 20s and Usernet went from heaven to hell in about 6 months. AOL AND NetTV consoles. Room titles went from Nerd/Hacker/CS to Single Meetup rooms, PR0N and Music topics. I left maybe just in time and moved to IRC (A-Net was also HELL the 4-chan Grandfather)????
gnaritas 10y ago
I remember him as well, he didn't understand OO well enough to critique it so very little of what he said had any actual value. "Spirited" is a nice way to put it, a bit colored by nostalgia though. His idea of programming is a big ball of procedural mud over a relational database where every task is a hand written sql query/loop over result set, fucking terrible.
- barrkel 10y ago
  Many integrated CRUD apps are best written as procedures (call them REST endpoints if you prefer) that (ultimately) use SQL queries to update a store of facts. In a heterogeneous world, the idea that you have an authoritative model defined in any one language, that merely uses the database for persistence, is untenable. Objects with hidden state are a poor way to model facts about the world. Having been a follower of OOP since the early 90s until my disillusionment in the mid 00s, to my mind only a handful of problem domains are best modelled as interacting graphs of mutable objects, and the set grows smaller over time. I'm increasingly unconvinced that procedures+SQL done well is inferior to the average developer's OOP code. And if OOP hasn't delivered that kind of mental leverage, then it's mostly a sham. (I should add that I'm far more inclined to try and model things functionally, with functions that turn input into a set of logical diffs rather than straight-up database modifications, than actually advocate all-out procedural programming with raw SQL. But even raw SQL is superior to effectively performing complex queries in a non-relational language, where the indexes are built by hand and passed around.)
  - naasking 10y ago
    > only a handful of problem domains are best modelled as interacting graphs of mutable objects, and the set grows smaller over time. Indeed, the CRUD service itself is an OO interface (send it GET/POST messages to an endpoint). How that's implemented behind that need not be OO.
    - barrkel 10y ago
      And arguably that's the biggest problem with the modern web: the non-idempotence of GET in a world with PUT (and POST).
mikerichards 10y ago
I think topmind/tablizer has been somewhat vindicated with the rise of Clojure and Rich Hickey ranting on OO in a much more eloquent way. But generally, I think the glow of OO as some kind of awesome panacea for software development woes has worn off. Or at the very least, the way it was sold back in the 90s has been pretty much debunked.

jvoorhis 10y ago

When I saw the headline I immediately thought of http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TopMind http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TopMind

dri_ft 10y ago
Me too. I binged a lot of the C2 wiki last year and waded through a lot of his spew.
rosege 10y ago
My first thought was, sharing is tables

to3m 10y ago

I remember him from the late 1990s, I think. One of the various usenet weirdos I have somewhat fond memories of reading at the time. "Wow, who the hell were those freaks", I'd think, as I left a computer room at university, blinking at the sunlight (since the room I'd usually go to, on account of its good-sized set of underused HP9000s, had slightly dim lighting and zero windows), having just spent half a day of one of what would have been potentially the better years of my life reading what these people had to say. How could they find the time, I'd wonder. Didn't they have anything better to do? ;) Still fascinating though. Usenet was like a crash course in seeing how people can be dicks. Still can't decide whether I regret it or not.

digi_owl 10y ago
By late 90s, eternal september had set in. Meaning that anyone with AOL access could access usenet. the net has likely never recovered.
- baldfat 10y ago
  I REMEMBER THAT. I was in my early 20s and Usernet went from heaven to hell in about 6 months. AOL AND NetTV consoles. Room titles went from Nerd/Hacker/CS to Single Meetup rooms, PR0N and Music topics. I left maybe just in time and moved to IRC (A-Net was also HELL the 4-chan Grandfather)????

gnaritas 10y ago

I remember him as well, he didn't understand OO well enough to critique it so very little of what he said had any actual value. "Spirited" is a nice way to put it, a bit colored by nostalgia though. His idea of programming is a big ball of procedural mud over a relational database where every task is a hand written sql query/loop over result set, fucking terrible.

barrkel 10y ago
Many integrated CRUD apps are best written as procedures (call them REST endpoints if you prefer) that (ultimately) use SQL queries to update a store of facts. In a heterogeneous world, the idea that you have an authoritative model defined in any one language, that merely uses the database for persistence, is untenable. Objects with hidden state are a poor way to model facts about the world. Having been a follower of OOP since the early 90s until my disillusionment in the mid 00s, to my mind only a handful of problem domains are best modelled as interacting graphs of mutable objects, and the set grows smaller over time. I'm increasingly unconvinced that procedures+SQL done well is inferior to the average developer's OOP code. And if OOP hasn't delivered that kind of mental leverage, then it's mostly a sham. (I should add that I'm far more inclined to try and model things functionally, with functions that turn input into a set of logical diffs rather than straight-up database modifications, than actually advocate all-out procedural programming with raw SQL. But even raw SQL is superior to effectively performing complex queries in a non-relational language, where the indexes are built by hand and passed around.)
- naasking 10y ago
  > only a handful of problem domains are best modelled as interacting graphs of mutable objects, and the set grows smaller over time. Indeed, the CRUD service itself is an OO interface (send it GET/POST messages to an endpoint). How that's implemented behind that need not be OO.
  - barrkel 10y ago
    And arguably that's the biggest problem with the modern web: the non-idempotence of GET in a world with PUT (and POST).

mikerichards 10y ago

I think topmind/tablizer has been somewhat vindicated with the rise of Clojure and Rich Hickey ranting on OO in a much more eloquent way. But generally, I think the glow of OO as some kind of awesome panacea for software development woes has worn off. Or at the very least, the way it was sold back in the 90s has been pretty much debunked.