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But I came here to read commentators' statements on the subject. I only clicked the paper due to your comment. The paper makes the claim, early, "[OOP's] cent

But I came here to read commentators' statements on the subject. I only clicked the paper due to your comment. The paper makes the claim, early, "[OOP's] central premise appears to be that it matches the way we think about the world." This is the same as the title, and enough for us to discuss. I want to hear what people here have to say about the subject. That's a lot more interesting than what this 1997 paper has to say on the subject. (Of course, people can comment about that as well.)

brudgers 9y ago
If writing is thinking (and googling "writing is thinking" quote produces plenty of hits), then object oriented code reflects the way we think because we write it...I mean thinking in terms of object orientation is pretty a given in order to right object orientated code. That's a different proposition than object oriented programming reflects the primary way humans think or the only way humans think. Without diving deep into the uncanny valleys of existential philosophy surrounding trying to be both observer and observed, there is a big leap from I am thinking in objects right now to Everyone always thinks in objects [or something approaching it].
- logicallee 9y ago
  By that standard it is impossible for any type system not to match the way we think: for example a programming language could be abstracted in terms of food, recipes, and breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and express literally everything that way. Although by your standard our code would then match the way we think, clearly this is not a useful takeaway.
  - dom0 9y ago
    You're not refuting the point he was making, because no one is writing code in such a language. > If writing is thinking, then object oriented code reflects the way we think because we write it The point is the huge majority of systems (by any metric; number of engineers, lines of code, budget, ...) are written in an OO style (regardless of whether the language actually supports OO; practically all bigger C projects use OO); and the majority of people are just fine with that and get started fairly easily with it. Hence it is reasonable to assume OO being a good fit to our own thinking processes. By comparison, very few people find learning FP easy, and most seasoned FP developers openly say that getting started and acquiring the mindset for FP is a difficult and long-winded process. Similarly, most people find reasoning about point-free programs (concatenative languages such as Forth) quite difficult.
    - logicallee 9y ago
      (Yes, I misread the line you quoted as saying something different.) You also made your point very well, and all the facts you highlight support you and are good reason for me to doubt my conclusion regarding object oriented programming. I thought it's a terrible match for how people think about the world yet you give very strong reasons why I was wrong. (In other words you've convinced me.) Thank you.
    - naasking 9y ago
      I actually don't think any of the points you've raised are valid or empirically supported at all. Most novices do not in fact find OO easy to learn, and most novices do not in fact find FP harder than OO to learn. What you are probably alluding to is the difficulty in learning a specific language, like Haskell. Haskell is not FP. Also, while most software projects use some kind of OO language these days, I don't know why in the world you'd think this somehow entails it fits our thinking. By all accounts, software defect rates aren't any better under OO than under procedural language paradigms. How does that make it intuitive? To make any kind of "reasonable" conclusion, you'd need a comparison against software written under other paradigms. Such studies have been done, and OO does not fare as well as other paradigms on many metrics.
  - brudgers 9y ago
    That's not the idea I was trying to convey. I think any claim that any language (computer or ordinary or otherwise) captures the way people think independent of the use of that language is at least suspect [and for me probably false, but I could be wrong]. To me, it seems more likely that the flexibility of human cognition allows a person to think in terms of a programming language than any particular programming language expresses something important about the mechanics of human thought. Another way of putting it is that the claim that object oriented programming is ontologically different from other Turing complete languages seems less believable than ontological equivalence -- the Chicken [1] interpreter is written in JavaScript. http://torso.me/chicken http://torso.me/chicken
    - logicallee 9y ago
      I'm afraid we disagree entirely. Before the existence of any computer language, humans talked, and thought: at various levels of rigor. Mathematical books were published for millennia. People thought, interpreted their world, argued with each other, and so forth. With the advent of computer languages, some of these have captured more of this independent thinking and abstraction, others capture less of it, while still others require their users to learn abstractions they were not used to. The idea that all of this falls in the last category, with no capturing of the way "people think independent of the use of that language" is totally false to me. Sorry.
      - brudgers 9y ago
        Mathematical books were published for millennia. Writing is thinking...etc.
        logicallee 9y ago
        Can you be a bit more precise? I feel like we're talking past each other but perhaps have misunderstood each other.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- naasking 9y ago
  > then object oriented code reflects the way we think because we write it There are non-linguistic modes of thought that more naturally capture our intuition of evolving systems. You don't linguistically think through a baseball play in the moment. The most intuitive programming paradigms are actually event-driven [1]. To summarize, you can compute by thinking and you might be able to think by computing, but thinking is not like computing. Any particular programming paradigm is a mode of computing, not thinking. A programming paradigm that more closely aligns with thinking is more intuitive and natural, and will lead to fewer errors. [1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pane/IJHCS.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pane/IJHCS.html

brudgers 9y ago

If writing is thinking (and googling "writing is thinking" quote produces plenty of hits), then object oriented code reflects the way we think because we write it...I mean thinking in terms of object orientation is pretty a given in order to right object orientated code. That's a different proposition than object oriented programming reflects the primary way humans think or the only way humans think. Without diving deep into the uncanny valleys of existential philosophy surrounding trying to be both observer and observed, there is a big leap from I am thinking in objects right now to Everyone always thinks in objects [or something approaching it].

logicallee 9y ago
By that standard it is impossible for any type system not to match the way we think: for example a programming language could be abstracted in terms of food, recipes, and breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and express literally everything that way. Although by your standard our code would then match the way we think, clearly this is not a useful takeaway.
- dom0 9y ago
  You're not refuting the point he was making, because no one is writing code in such a language. > If writing is thinking, then object oriented code reflects the way we think because we write it The point is the huge majority of systems (by any metric; number of engineers, lines of code, budget, ...) are written in an OO style (regardless of whether the language actually supports OO; practically all bigger C projects use OO); and the majority of people are just fine with that and get started fairly easily with it. Hence it is reasonable to assume OO being a good fit to our own thinking processes. By comparison, very few people find learning FP easy, and most seasoned FP developers openly say that getting started and acquiring the mindset for FP is a difficult and long-winded process. Similarly, most people find reasoning about point-free programs (concatenative languages such as Forth) quite difficult.
  - logicallee 9y ago
    (Yes, I misread the line you quoted as saying something different.) You also made your point very well, and all the facts you highlight support you and are good reason for me to doubt my conclusion regarding object oriented programming. I thought it's a terrible match for how people think about the world yet you give very strong reasons why I was wrong. (In other words you've convinced me.) Thank you.
  - naasking 9y ago
    I actually don't think any of the points you've raised are valid or empirically supported at all. Most novices do not in fact find OO easy to learn, and most novices do not in fact find FP harder than OO to learn. What you are probably alluding to is the difficulty in learning a specific language, like Haskell. Haskell is not FP. Also, while most software projects use some kind of OO language these days, I don't know why in the world you'd think this somehow entails it fits our thinking. By all accounts, software defect rates aren't any better under OO than under procedural language paradigms. How does that make it intuitive? To make any kind of "reasonable" conclusion, you'd need a comparison against software written under other paradigms. Such studies have been done, and OO does not fare as well as other paradigms on many metrics.
- brudgers 9y ago
  That's not the idea I was trying to convey. I think any claim that any language (computer or ordinary or otherwise) captures the way people think independent of the use of that language is at least suspect [and for me probably false, but I could be wrong]. To me, it seems more likely that the flexibility of human cognition allows a person to think in terms of a programming language than any particular programming language expresses something important about the mechanics of human thought. Another way of putting it is that the claim that object oriented programming is ontologically different from other Turing complete languages seems less believable than ontological equivalence -- the Chicken [1] interpreter is written in JavaScript. http://torso.me/chicken http://torso.me/chicken
  - logicallee 9y ago
    I'm afraid we disagree entirely. Before the existence of any computer language, humans talked, and thought: at various levels of rigor. Mathematical books were published for millennia. People thought, interpreted their world, argued with each other, and so forth. With the advent of computer languages, some of these have captured more of this independent thinking and abstraction, others capture less of it, while still others require their users to learn abstractions they were not used to. The idea that all of this falls in the last category, with no capturing of the way "people think independent of the use of that language" is totally false to me. Sorry.
    - brudgers 9y ago
      Mathematical books were published for millennia. Writing is thinking...etc.
      - logicallee 9y ago
        Can you be a bit more precise? I feel like we're talking past each other but perhaps have misunderstood each other.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
naasking 9y ago
> then object oriented code reflects the way we think because we write it There are non-linguistic modes of thought that more naturally capture our intuition of evolving systems. You don't linguistically think through a baseball play in the moment. The most intuitive programming paradigms are actually event-driven [1]. To summarize, you can compute by thinking and you might be able to think by computing, but thinking is not like computing. Any particular programming paradigm is a mode of computing, not thinking. A programming paradigm that more closely aligns with thinking is more intuitive and natural, and will lead to fewer errors. [1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pane/IJHCS.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pane/IJHCS.html