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> If anything I feel the failure of OO languages What failure exactly? OOP has flaws but it has certainly proven to be extremely versatile and adaptable over

> If anything I feel the failure of OO languages What failure exactly? OOP has flaws but it has certainly proven to be extremely versatile and adaptable over these past decades since even today, it's still the dominant paradigm to solve modern problems in computing.

optforfon 10y ago
Sorry, I mean "drawbacks". One of the reoccurring complaints about OO is that it leads to huge codebases. Lots of articles about how X rewrote some Java program in Y and it's not 10x smaller and 100x more maintainable. This is a consequence of languages being designed to be minimal in terms of keywords - trying to push off as much as possible on to library writers. Unfortunately this seems to have serious limitations and all the boilerplate can't seem to be hidden in library wrappers
- kmiroslav 10y ago
  "Huge code base" is a pretty vague metric. Huge in what, lines of code? Binary size? I'd argue that neither of these are really a good measure, I'm more interested in the concepts that a source file captures than its size in kb, because these concepts correlate directly to how easy it will be to evolve that code base in the future. There is a point of diminishing return in trying to make the code too compact, which basically means you're optimizing in one dimension at the detriments of all the others.
- dursk 10y ago
  The problem there is that any re-write, even staying within OO, is going to result in the codebase being smaller.
infinite8s 10y ago
Seriously? Have you watched any of the demos Alan references? They were doing things with computers in the 1960s/70s that still haven't reached mainstream use as yet. Computers as used today are still absolutely dumb machines that are little more than super-fast calculators, and in most cases increases the mental burden of their users instead of reducing/augmenting them. Nicholas Negroponte had a great quote in '94 that's still true today - "those infra-red urinals in public restrooms know more about what we are doing than our computers today."
- wdewind 10y ago
  Do you have links to any of those demos?
  - tripzilch 10y ago
    See infinite8s' post above. The "Engelbart's demo" mentioned is called The Mother of All Demos, which you can find by that title on youtube. I have to admit I never really got further than the first 5-10 minutes or so. My first computer experiences are from the late 80s (and indeed didn't have a mouse) but this demo is so old, I kept having to mentally translate for myself which bits might have been new or ground breaking, and which just plain archaic. I keep meaning to watch it in full some day, but the first bit that I saw, I keep feeling I'm missing something important. People are lyrical about this demo (hence the name!), but I don't quite feel it or something. Then again, while I appreciate the great work of engineering that went into it, I'm not really one to sit down and watch a documentary about the moon landing program either. Maybe somebody here knows a good link or article about The Mother of All Demos that explains which things I should be in awe about and why they were so novel then? Part of it kind of looks like a simple database table system, which reminds me of a stupid story from my childhood. When I was young (~1990 I guess), I was playing with the MSX BASIC on a friend's computer whose family had a farm. They wondered if I could write anything to keep track of their cows or something--sure thing! (though I really preferred to write graphics code, later joined the demoscene, way more fun). Now I had no idea about business or their requirements (let alone requirements engineering), so I just wrote some whatever that let them enter data, but in the back of my mind I wondered how this was going to be useful for anything. Neither did I know (yet) how to actually save the data so it'd be available after reboot, which was probably a big reason for my doubts. And they were still impressed (that it could repeat names of many cows, I guess). I never finished it (nor any idea of what "finished" would mean).
- ludamad 10y ago
  Can you summarize what those things might be? (That haven't reached mainstream use)
  - 10y ago
Retra 10y ago
All that versatility and adaptability comes at the expense of various kinds of boilerplate, most of which can be avoided by employing other styles. In other words, it's not more versatile, it's only "Turing complete", and versatility would mean using a number of different styles and being efficient in each.

optforfon 10y ago

Sorry, I mean "drawbacks". One of the reoccurring complaints about OO is that it leads to huge codebases. Lots of articles about how X rewrote some Java program in Y and it's not 10x smaller and 100x more maintainable. This is a consequence of languages being designed to be minimal in terms of keywords - trying to push off as much as possible on to library writers. Unfortunately this seems to have serious limitations and all the boilerplate can't seem to be hidden in library wrappers

kmiroslav 10y ago
"Huge code base" is a pretty vague metric. Huge in what, lines of code? Binary size? I'd argue that neither of these are really a good measure, I'm more interested in the concepts that a source file captures than its size in kb, because these concepts correlate directly to how easy it will be to evolve that code base in the future. There is a point of diminishing return in trying to make the code too compact, which basically means you're optimizing in one dimension at the detriments of all the others.
dursk 10y ago
The problem there is that any re-write, even staying within OO, is going to result in the codebase being smaller.

infinite8s 10y ago

Seriously? Have you watched any of the demos Alan references? They were doing things with computers in the 1960s/70s that still haven't reached mainstream use as yet. Computers as used today are still absolutely dumb machines that are little more than super-fast calculators, and in most cases increases the mental burden of their users instead of reducing/augmenting them. Nicholas Negroponte had a great quote in '94 that's still true today - "those infra-red urinals in public restrooms know more about what we are doing than our computers today."

wdewind 10y ago
Do you have links to any of those demos?
- tripzilch 10y ago
  See infinite8s' post above. The "Engelbart's demo" mentioned is called The Mother of All Demos, which you can find by that title on youtube. I have to admit I never really got further than the first 5-10 minutes or so. My first computer experiences are from the late 80s (and indeed didn't have a mouse) but this demo is so old, I kept having to mentally translate for myself which bits might have been new or ground breaking, and which just plain archaic. I keep meaning to watch it in full some day, but the first bit that I saw, I keep feeling I'm missing something important. People are lyrical about this demo (hence the name!), but I don't quite feel it or something. Then again, while I appreciate the great work of engineering that went into it, I'm not really one to sit down and watch a documentary about the moon landing program either. Maybe somebody here knows a good link or article about The Mother of All Demos that explains which things I should be in awe about and why they were so novel then? Part of it kind of looks like a simple database table system, which reminds me of a stupid story from my childhood. When I was young (~1990 I guess), I was playing with the MSX BASIC on a friend's computer whose family had a farm. They wondered if I could write anything to keep track of their cows or something--sure thing! (though I really preferred to write graphics code, later joined the demoscene, way more fun). Now I had no idea about business or their requirements (let alone requirements engineering), so I just wrote some whatever that let them enter data, but in the back of my mind I wondered how this was going to be useful for anything. Neither did I know (yet) how to actually save the data so it'd be available after reboot, which was probably a big reason for my doubts. And they were still impressed (that it could repeat names of many cows, I guess). I never finished it (nor any idea of what "finished" would mean).
ludamad 10y ago
Can you summarize what those things might be? (That haven't reached mainstream use)
- 10y ago

Retra 10y ago

All that versatility and adaptability comes at the expense of various kinds of boilerplate, most of which can be avoided by employing other styles. In other words, it's not more versatile, it's only "Turing complete", and versatility would mean using a number of different styles and being efficient in each.