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I really dislike this kind of hand-wavy dismissal of ideas/opinions as “programmer-hipster”. It seems to assume the person in question has no intelligent reaso

I really dislike this kind of hand-wavy dismissal of ideas/opinions as “programmer-hipster”. It seems to assume the person in question has no intelligent reason behind their thoughts/opinions. And it dismisses the opinion instead of engaging with it intellectually. And having been on the receiving end, it’s insulting. It feels like being called stupid. It’s fine to disagree with opinions, but when you assume people are “signaling”, you’re assuming the worst about people before seeking to understand them.

psyc 9y ago
I get what you're saying, but I'm still persuaded this is what happens with Kay and/or smalltalk. 100 times I've seen threads about OO. 99 times someone brought up Kay/smalltalk. Zero times did they specify why the messaging model was relevant to the present discussion. That's important to do, because more OO programmers use C++/C#/Java, and are not smalltalk experts. So, it seemed to me that they were namedropping. Which opinion should I have engaged with?
- PaulStatezny 9y ago
  That makes sense. Sounds like the kind of comments you tend to see are out of context and don’t engage with the subject matter. I can see how that comes across as signaling.
- bitwize 9y ago
  Duck typing is central to the Smalltalk "vision thing". That and the idea that a message is a symbolic representation of a method, which an object may or may not support. It is not, in fact, the method, nor does it stand for a direct call to the method. In C++ and Java, for a call to a.foo(12) the compiler can look up the class of a, determine whether it has a foo implementation, and if so compile a call directly with the number 12. In Smalltalk, a foo: 12 has no such implications. Rather the runtime will look up whether a's class has a foo: method at call time and if so, invoke that method; otherwise invoke the object's doesNotUnderstand: method with the message and arguments as parameters. There's an added layer of indirection there. It's rather like a single-threaded Actor model. Kay was trying to get people to think in terms of encapsulated objects that communicate in (often ad hoc!) ways, not in terms of inheritance trees or type hierarchies. Is it better? Is it worse? I don't know. We know Smalltalk is slower, but it (along with Objective-C) admits designs unfathomable in C++. For example, all objects that understand a given protocol (set of methods) and implement it in a sensible way are substitutable with each other (with respect to the protocol) irrespective of their place on the inheritance hierarchy (or even whether such protocol was formally defined). This is NOT true with C++, absent template metaprogramming, and it's not true with Java unless you define an interface and assert that all classes which understand those methods implement that interface. Furthermore, by overriding doesNotUnderstand:, you can specify a behavior for classes when sent a message they don't have a method for, besides raising an error. Maybe you want them to forward the method to one or more delegate objects, or log the invocation. It's super-flexible, powerful, and neat in a similar dynamic-language way to how Lisp is neat. That's why Smalltalk attracts so many fervent converts. As I said, it can be better or worse depending on your perspective. Some people like working with type hierarchies; Haskell, Rust, and even C++ attract fervent converts too!
  - BeeOnRope 9y ago
    > This is NOT true with C++, absent template metaprogramming... So it is true in C++ then, right? It's only not true in "C++ minus templates" which is a language no one uses.
    - bitwize 9y ago
      Introducing template metaprogramming comes with its own passel of problems: compile times (and code size) can explode, and then there are the difficult-to-debug error messages if you screw up. Because Smalltalk uses latent types, these decisions are deferred till run time, which is a loss for static analysis, but doesn't require a separate generated bit of code for every combination of arbitrary types used in the program, and it can be debugged on the spot without recompiling much more than a single method.
      - jcelerier 9y ago
        > Introducing template metaprogramming comes with its own passel of problems: compile times (and code size) can explode, and then there are the difficult-to-debug error messages if you screw up I don't know any even remotely large recent C++ project that does not use templates at some point. Templates are central to C++ since Alexandrescu's book and the main point around which the current language revolves.
      - gnulinux 9y ago
        I've never seen a C++ codebase without templates in my life.
        psyc 9y ago
        Template meta-programming is a different usage from template generics. It has a higher compile time cost because it performs computations as a side-effect of compilation.
        gnulinux 9y ago
- true_religion 9y ago
  The concept of smalltalk are implemented to some degree in many dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, Elixir, etc. And if we are going to talk about functional programming, we can't exclude languages like Python for having too small a user base, as their popularity and impact is often wider than that of any static functional language.
geezerjay 9y ago
> It seems to assume the person in question has no intelligent reason behind their thoughts/opinions. If they had, they wouldn't systematically resort to baseless appeals to authority, whose only purpose is to intentionally avoid having to present any semblant of an intelligent reason.
- PaulStatezny 9y ago
  > If they had, they wouldn't systematically resort to baseless appeals to authority, whose only purpose is to intentionally avoid having to present any semblant of an intelligent reason. This is pretty much what I was talking about. It assumes the worst about someone before hearing them out. It’s a pretty unreasonable assumption to count every reference to Alan Kay’s quote about OOP as a “baseless appeal to authority”. Perhaps the person has given a lot of deep thought about the matter, and have reached some reasonable conclusions. If you dismiss the person, you’re just cheating yourself of an opportunity to learn and engage in intelligent conversation. And blindly insulting the person.

psyc 9y ago

I get what you're saying, but I'm still persuaded this is what happens with Kay and/or smalltalk. 100 times I've seen threads about OO. 99 times someone brought up Kay/smalltalk. Zero times did they specify why the messaging model was relevant to the present discussion. That's important to do, because more OO programmers use C++/C#/Java, and are not smalltalk experts. So, it seemed to me that they were namedropping. Which opinion should I have engaged with?

PaulStatezny 9y ago
That makes sense. Sounds like the kind of comments you tend to see are out of context and don’t engage with the subject matter. I can see how that comes across as signaling.
bitwize 9y ago
Duck typing is central to the Smalltalk "vision thing". That and the idea that a message is a symbolic representation of a method, which an object may or may not support. It is not, in fact, the method, nor does it stand for a direct call to the method. In C++ and Java, for a call to a.foo(12) the compiler can look up the class of a, determine whether it has a foo implementation, and if so compile a call directly with the number 12. In Smalltalk, a foo: 12 has no such implications. Rather the runtime will look up whether a's class has a foo: method at call time and if so, invoke that method; otherwise invoke the object's doesNotUnderstand: method with the message and arguments as parameters. There's an added layer of indirection there. It's rather like a single-threaded Actor model. Kay was trying to get people to think in terms of encapsulated objects that communicate in (often ad hoc!) ways, not in terms of inheritance trees or type hierarchies. Is it better? Is it worse? I don't know. We know Smalltalk is slower, but it (along with Objective-C) admits designs unfathomable in C++. For example, all objects that understand a given protocol (set of methods) and implement it in a sensible way are substitutable with each other (with respect to the protocol) irrespective of their place on the inheritance hierarchy (or even whether such protocol was formally defined). This is NOT true with C++, absent template metaprogramming, and it's not true with Java unless you define an interface and assert that all classes which understand those methods implement that interface. Furthermore, by overriding doesNotUnderstand:, you can specify a behavior for classes when sent a message they don't have a method for, besides raising an error. Maybe you want them to forward the method to one or more delegate objects, or log the invocation. It's super-flexible, powerful, and neat in a similar dynamic-language way to how Lisp is neat. That's why Smalltalk attracts so many fervent converts. As I said, it can be better or worse depending on your perspective. Some people like working with type hierarchies; Haskell, Rust, and even C++ attract fervent converts too!
- BeeOnRope 9y ago
  > This is NOT true with C++, absent template metaprogramming... So it is true in C++ then, right? It's only not true in "C++ minus templates" which is a language no one uses.
  - bitwize 9y ago
    Introducing template metaprogramming comes with its own passel of problems: compile times (and code size) can explode, and then there are the difficult-to-debug error messages if you screw up. Because Smalltalk uses latent types, these decisions are deferred till run time, which is a loss for static analysis, but doesn't require a separate generated bit of code for every combination of arbitrary types used in the program, and it can be debugged on the spot without recompiling much more than a single method.
    - jcelerier 9y ago
      > Introducing template metaprogramming comes with its own passel of problems: compile times (and code size) can explode, and then there are the difficult-to-debug error messages if you screw up I don't know any even remotely large recent C++ project that does not use templates at some point. Templates are central to C++ since Alexandrescu's book and the main point around which the current language revolves.
    - gnulinux 9y ago
      I've never seen a C++ codebase without templates in my life.
      - psyc 9y ago
        Template meta-programming is a different usage from template generics. It has a higher compile time cost because it performs computations as a side-effect of compilation.
        gnulinux 9y ago
true_religion 9y ago
The concept of smalltalk are implemented to some degree in many dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, Elixir, etc. And if we are going to talk about functional programming, we can't exclude languages like Python for having too small a user base, as their popularity and impact is often wider than that of any static functional language.

geezerjay 9y ago

> It seems to assume the person in question has no intelligent reason behind their thoughts/opinions. If they had, they wouldn't systematically resort to baseless appeals to authority, whose only purpose is to intentionally avoid having to present any semblant of an intelligent reason.

PaulStatezny 9y ago
> If they had, they wouldn't systematically resort to baseless appeals to authority, whose only purpose is to intentionally avoid having to present any semblant of an intelligent reason. This is pretty much what I was talking about. It assumes the worst about someone before hearing them out. It’s a pretty unreasonable assumption to count every reference to Alan Kay’s quote about OOP as a “baseless appeal to authority”. Perhaps the person has given a lot of deep thought about the matter, and have reached some reasonable conclusions. If you dismiss the person, you’re just cheating yourself of an opportunity to learn and engage in intelligent conversation. And blindly insulting the person.