4 ms·

My first OO language was Java; I learned it in college. After learning Java I thought I'd mastered OO. Last year I learned Lisp, now I understand that I've on

My first OO language was Java; I learned it in college. After learning Java I thought I'd mastered OO. Last year I learned Lisp, now I understand that I've only now mastered OO and that Java has some major limits (such as single-dispatch). There is a real problem in that different people (e.g. the me from college vs. the me from now) have very different and incompatible ideas of what OO programming means.

lisper 18y ago
That's only a problem if you think the terminology matters. It doesn't. What matters are the concepts. It's much easier to map the terminology onto the concepts than to try to go the other way around. For example, it's much easier to go from a concept like "I can use the SAME NAME for DIFFERENT FUNCTIONS in the SAME PROGRAM, and there are various ways to map useful semantics onto the resulting code" to "If I resolve the ambiguity at run-time then it's POLYMORPHISM and if I do it at compile time then it's OPERATOR OVERLOADING" than it is to start with the terms POLYMORPHISM and OPERATOR OVERLOADING and try to learn what they mean and what they are good for.
- Zak 18y ago
  I think the problem is more along the lines of thinking that OOP means one specific subset of a long list of features. I agree that it doesn't matter much what the feature is called in any given implementation. PG has published such a list by Jonathan Rees here: http://paulgraham.com/reesoo.html http://paulgraham.com/reesoo.html
DanWeinreb 18y ago
I guess so, but actually I don't think that Java and CLOS have such a different idea of what OOP means. They just have different specific features. CLOS has multimethods and multiple inheritance; Java has explicit interfaces. Frankly, multiple inheritance, and multimethods, are nice tools when you need them, but I'd say that most of the time, you don't. (Let me clarify that. Doing what Java does with multiple inheritance of interfaces IS very important, and it would be very bad to leave that out. What Java cannot do, namely multiple inheritance of implementation, is much less crucial. And you can very often get around it by using delegation. See "The Treaty of Orlando" which asserts that multiple inheritance and delegation have the same inherent power. (This was formulated at an OOPSLA conference in the 80's; Henry Lieberman was one of the main authors.) Anyway, my point is that Java does indeed have limitations, but the fundamental concepts are very similar to those in CLOS.
- cconstantine 18y ago
  Absolutely. The only real difference I could see is that object methods belong to classes in java, but methods happen to possibly work with objects in CLOS. I prefer CLOS over Java because of the list of features, but the point I was trying to make is that different people (and even the same person at different times) have different ideas of what OOP is. This leads to funky designs and all kinds of messes.

lisper 18y ago

That's only a problem if you think the terminology matters. It doesn't. What matters are the concepts. It's much easier to map the terminology onto the concepts than to try to go the other way around. For example, it's much easier to go from a concept like "I can use the SAME NAME for DIFFERENT FUNCTIONS in the SAME PROGRAM, and there are various ways to map useful semantics onto the resulting code" to "If I resolve the ambiguity at run-time then it's POLYMORPHISM and if I do it at compile time then it's OPERATOR OVERLOADING" than it is to start with the terms POLYMORPHISM and OPERATOR OVERLOADING and try to learn what they mean and what they are good for.

Zak 18y ago
I think the problem is more along the lines of thinking that OOP means one specific subset of a long list of features. I agree that it doesn't matter much what the feature is called in any given implementation. PG has published such a list by Jonathan Rees here: http://paulgraham.com/reesoo.html http://paulgraham.com/reesoo.html

DanWeinreb 18y ago

I guess so, but actually I don't think that Java and CLOS have such a different idea of what OOP means. They just have different specific features. CLOS has multimethods and multiple inheritance; Java has explicit interfaces. Frankly, multiple inheritance, and multimethods, are nice tools when you need them, but I'd say that most of the time, you don't. (Let me clarify that. Doing what Java does with multiple inheritance of interfaces IS very important, and it would be very bad to leave that out. What Java cannot do, namely multiple inheritance of implementation, is much less crucial. And you can very often get around it by using delegation. See "The Treaty of Orlando" which asserts that multiple inheritance and delegation have the same inherent power. (This was formulated at an OOPSLA conference in the 80's; Henry Lieberman was one of the main authors.) Anyway, my point is that Java does indeed have limitations, but the fundamental concepts are very similar to those in CLOS.

cconstantine 18y ago
Absolutely. The only real difference I could see is that object methods belong to classes in java, but methods happen to possibly work with objects in CLOS. I prefer CLOS over Java because of the list of features, but the point I was trying to make is that different people (and even the same person at different times) have different ideas of what OOP is. This leads to funky designs and all kinds of messes.