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I love work like this - a real attempt to understand what was happening. Genuine scholarship. But it illustrates the issues with this sort of work. This is rea

by sgt101 9y ago

I love work like this - a real attempt to understand what was happening. Genuine scholarship. But it illustrates the issues with this sort of work. This is really about C++ vs C/Pascal and not OO vs Proc. Also this is 1997 C++ which I earned a living from for a brief moment, and I can attest, it was horrible, and very different from 2017 C++. From my perspective today : we need to separate parametric and polymorphic oo in our thinking and the big problem is that programmers use these tools to the limit (creating objects with 3+ parameters or deep inheritance hierarchies) and weave silly complexity into the code base . In a commercial setting the biggest impact I have seen is a project that became impossible to staff because as soon as the developers saw the code base they started looking for other work. It was really good code developed by a two brilliant people initially and then three or four more smart ones as the project grew, but when the lead left it was just too complex - due to prolific use of generics and a obsession with ORM.

mannykannot 9y ago
> This is really about C++ vs C/Pascal and not OO vs Proc. Also this is 1997 C++... I can imagine the Smalltalk community rolling its collective eyes and saying "that's not OO..." My issue with the primary study is that the two programs are not really comparable: a think a C++ parser was a harder problem than a C parser (even given that it is 1997's C++), and this is backed up in the study: "The C++ parser by further contrast is a recursive descent parser owing to the intractability of parsing C++ using 1 token-lookahead grammars. In other words, they are very different products..." In mitigation, it says that the C++ parser, as used in the comparison, did not parse the full language, thereby presumably reducing the difference in the complexity of the requirements, but I think the difference in architecture alone is enough to raise doubts over the significance of the results.

by sgt101 9y ago

mannykannot 9y ago

> This is really about C++ vs C/Pascal and not OO vs Proc. Also this is 1997 C++... I can imagine the Smalltalk community rolling its collective eyes and saying "that's not OO..." My issue with the primary study is that the two programs are not really comparable: a think a C++ parser was a harder problem than a C parser (even given that it is 1997's C++), and this is backed up in the study: "The C++ parser by further contrast is a recursive descent parser owing to the intractability of parsing C++ using 1 token-lookahead grammars. In other words, they are very different products..." In mitigation, it says that the C++ parser, as used in the comparison, did not parse the full language, thereby presumably reducing the difference in the complexity of the requirements, but I think the difference in architecture alone is enough to raise doubts over the significance of the results.