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> multiple dispatch, which is strictly more powerful. In a language that supports classes I can have class B inherit from class A and automatically provide all

> multiple dispatch, which is strictly more powerful. In a language that supports classes I can have class B inherit from class A and automatically provide all of class A's functionality without adding a single extra line of code. I can extend class B's functionality by adding only code that is specific to it. I don't see how to do that with multiple dispatch, at least the way it's implemented in Julia.

logicchains 7y ago
>In a language that supports classes I can have class B inherit from class A and automatically provide all of class A's functionality without adding a single extra line of code. And people will abuse this to create horrible brittle inheritance hierachies. There's a reason modern languages like Go and Rust deliberately don't support implementation inheritance; to many people it's an antifeature.
- tgflynn 7y ago
  The thing about software is that the "one true way" changes every 2 or 3 years. A few decades ago inheritance was considered a key software design principle, then it was abused by many (especially Java programmers, I think), just like any other powerful feature, now it's considered evil. If multiple dispatch becomes as popular as classes/inheritance was, I suspect it will go through the same love/hate cycle. All I know is that I have used implementation inheritance to good effect on multiple occasions and found it to be a very valuable feature.
  - jdmichal 7y ago
    Inheritance is not really all that powerful, assuming that one follows SOLID and especially Liskov substitution. There's very few places where it's actually applicable. Interfaces are much more widely applicable -- defining contracts instead of behaviour makes it much easier to follow SOLID. I mostly only use inheritance for patching the behaviour of some code I don't own by overriding some specific method. Because that's the only mechanism the language provides to perform such a modification. This is basically the use-case that Julia's multiple dispatch addresses.
    - kazinator 7y ago
      It's important to always remember the context that SOLID is a collection of one man's opinions. When we mix classes to create a new class, the ingredients in the mixture retain their adherence to their respective contracts, and we didn't have to re-implement them. > I mostly only use inheritance for patching the behaviour of some code. That's good for you, but you have to realize that classes specifically designed as inheritance bases are also a thing and the experience of using those kinds of classes with inheritance is not the same as deriving from any random class whose behavior we don't like in some aspect. The conventions by which a class supports inheritance are also a form of contract! The contract says that if you derive from me, you can expect certain behaviors, and also have certain responsibilities regarding what to implement and how, and what not to depend on or not to do and such. If a class is not designed for inheritance, then there is no contract, beyond some superficial expectations that come from the OOP system, some of which can fall victim to hostilities in the way the class is implemented, or maintained in the future.
  - gugagore 7y ago
    It's interesting to think about what multiple dispatch abuse would be. As far as I know, implementation inheritance can be misapplied when you try too hard to use the language's type system to capture some domain-specific model. e.g. you're dealing with multiple kinds of entities, and they all have a `name`, so you decide that all of the classes should inherit from `class Named`, because they have that in common with each other. Well, there's lots of different taxonomies possible for your entities, probably. And single implementation inheritance lets you express just one taxonomy. Interfaces and multiple inheritance aim to allow multiple co-existing taxonomies, but I can't really explain the ways in which its misapplied. I agree that there are some clear situations for implementation inheritance, so it seems like a useful pattern to be able to support. I think the discussion is whether it should be a key design principle, and built into the language design, or if the language design should be more general, so that implementation inheritance can be built on top of that.
- kazinator 7y ago
  In TXR Lisp, I doubled down on OOP and extended the object system to support multiple inheritance, just this December. Real inheritance of code and data allows for mixin programming, which is very useful. If you don't give OOP programmers the tools for mixing programming, they will find some other way to do it, such as some unattractive design pattern that fills their code with boilerplate, secondary objects, and unnecessary additional run-time switching and whatnot, all of which can be as brittle as any inheritance hierarchy, if not more.
byt143 7y ago
This can be done better with traits in Julia, which are more powerful, safer and faster. See here: https://white.ucc.asn.au/2018/10/03/Dispatch,-Traits-and-Metaprogramming-Over-Reflection.html https://white.ucc.asn.au/2018/10/03/Dispatch,-Traits-and-Met...
- tgflynn 7y ago
  Perhaps. The feeling I get with Julia is that the devs are sort of making it up as they go along. I don't mean just making up the language (which of course they're doing), but making up whole new approaches to programming that aren't necessarily well-understood and tested in the real world and certainly aren't very familiar to most programmers. Maybe in the end they will succeed and will invent a generally superior approach to software development. But for the moment it all feels very experimental and so not a language I'd want to commit to at present if I were starting a major, non-solo project.
  - chalst 7y ago
    A lot of the ideas come from Common Lisp.
oxinabox 7y ago
Generally via wrapping (Composition). ``` struct Foo <: AbstractFoo ... end struct SpecialFoo{T<:AbstractFoo} <: AbstractFoo backing::T end ``` and then delegating calls to the wrapped object
- tgflynn 7y ago
  Yes, but delegation requires a lot of extra code to get what you have for free in a class based language. And yes I know you can probably write macros to handle much of that but having to use meta-programming to get what other languages give you for free doesn't seem ideal to me.
  - mindB 7y ago
    If using meta-programming to get "basic" features rubs you the wrong way, the language might just not be for you. In general, the Julia philosophy (as well as the lisp philosophy from which Julia descends) is that things which can be done efficiently using macros instead of being built-in should be done with macros. Language features are only for things that cannot be accomplished via metaprogramming. As far as actual implementations of method-forwarding macros, there's an implementation in Lazy.jl[1], and TypedDelegation.jl[2]. [1] https://github.com/MikeInnes/Lazy.jl/blob/0de1643f37555396d615e825fb17b73edb0b5939/src/macros.jl#L275 https://github.com/MikeInnes/Lazy.jl/blob/0de1643f37555396d6... [2] https://github.com/JeffreySarnoff/TypedDelegation.jl https://github.com/JeffreySarnoff/TypedDelegation.jl
    - oxinabox 7y ago
      I have concluded that it is basically impossible to write a general purpose delegation macro. I have seen many and alway immediately run into cases they can't handle. A top level `for m in (:foo, :bar); @eval $m(X::MyType) = $m(X.backing)` Is general and has no performance overhead
      - mindB 7y ago
        To be honest, I've never found the need for delegating a huge number of methods in my own work, but then I've never wanted to add a feature or field to something as complex and featureful as e.g. a DataFrame. What issues have you run into when using method-forwarding/delegation macros? The nice thing about the Julia ecosystem is that people tend to be pretty willing to step back and define their methods in terms of an interface (Tables.jl in this case) which then allows code reuse without brittle delegation. Having to put so much effort into changing the structure of upstream doesn't seem ideal from a composability perspective though.
cultus 7y ago
Single-dispatch OOP dispatches (implicitly) only on the first argument, self. That is how Class B can provide the functionality of A. Multiple dispatch can dispatch on all arguments. Thus, OOP single dispatch is a special case of multiple dispatch. In your example, functionality in class B can be written simply as ordinary generic functions, which are inferred to their most general compatible type without annotations. Because of this, all functionality for class A will work for class B, as long as B is a superset of A. Not a single line of code, and no brittle inheritance hierarchies. Multiple dispatch is one solution to the expression problem, which both OOP and functional programming suffer from in dual ways. Other ones include Haskell's typeclasses and Ruby's mixins.
- tgflynn 7y ago
  Yes, but in Julia the problem is that inheritance isn't allowed from concrete types. So this example in Julia would mean that A is an abstract type whose objects can contain no data. So you have to figure out a way to implement functionality on A without having any data to work with. There are several ways to work around this but they all involve considerably more code complexity than would be required in a language like C++ that supports classes.
  - oivey 7y ago
    It’s maybe less of a problem than you think. If you simply want to call a method on two different types you can often just do it. Type annotations generally don’t help with performance, and any type checking is only going to happen at run time anyway. Inheritance does help with documenting what functions are compatible with what types. I think that could be better in Julia, and things like abstract type hierarchies and traits help a bit. Concrete inheritance could be nice, but that seems to also enable some pretty bad OOP practices.

logicchains 7y ago

>In a language that supports classes I can have class B inherit from class A and automatically provide all of class A's functionality without adding a single extra line of code. And people will abuse this to create horrible brittle inheritance hierachies. There's a reason modern languages like Go and Rust deliberately don't support implementation inheritance; to many people it's an antifeature.

tgflynn 7y ago
The thing about software is that the "one true way" changes every 2 or 3 years. A few decades ago inheritance was considered a key software design principle, then it was abused by many (especially Java programmers, I think), just like any other powerful feature, now it's considered evil. If multiple dispatch becomes as popular as classes/inheritance was, I suspect it will go through the same love/hate cycle. All I know is that I have used implementation inheritance to good effect on multiple occasions and found it to be a very valuable feature.
- jdmichal 7y ago
  Inheritance is not really all that powerful, assuming that one follows SOLID and especially Liskov substitution. There's very few places where it's actually applicable. Interfaces are much more widely applicable -- defining contracts instead of behaviour makes it much easier to follow SOLID. I mostly only use inheritance for patching the behaviour of some code I don't own by overriding some specific method. Because that's the only mechanism the language provides to perform such a modification. This is basically the use-case that Julia's multiple dispatch addresses.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    It's important to always remember the context that SOLID is a collection of one man's opinions. When we mix classes to create a new class, the ingredients in the mixture retain their adherence to their respective contracts, and we didn't have to re-implement them. > I mostly only use inheritance for patching the behaviour of some code. That's good for you, but you have to realize that classes specifically designed as inheritance bases are also a thing and the experience of using those kinds of classes with inheritance is not the same as deriving from any random class whose behavior we don't like in some aspect. The conventions by which a class supports inheritance are also a form of contract! The contract says that if you derive from me, you can expect certain behaviors, and also have certain responsibilities regarding what to implement and how, and what not to depend on or not to do and such. If a class is not designed for inheritance, then there is no contract, beyond some superficial expectations that come from the OOP system, some of which can fall victim to hostilities in the way the class is implemented, or maintained in the future.
- gugagore 7y ago
  It's interesting to think about what multiple dispatch abuse would be. As far as I know, implementation inheritance can be misapplied when you try too hard to use the language's type system to capture some domain-specific model. e.g. you're dealing with multiple kinds of entities, and they all have a `name`, so you decide that all of the classes should inherit from `class Named`, because they have that in common with each other. Well, there's lots of different taxonomies possible for your entities, probably. And single implementation inheritance lets you express just one taxonomy. Interfaces and multiple inheritance aim to allow multiple co-existing taxonomies, but I can't really explain the ways in which its misapplied. I agree that there are some clear situations for implementation inheritance, so it seems like a useful pattern to be able to support. I think the discussion is whether it should be a key design principle, and built into the language design, or if the language design should be more general, so that implementation inheritance can be built on top of that.
kazinator 7y ago
In TXR Lisp, I doubled down on OOP and extended the object system to support multiple inheritance, just this December. Real inheritance of code and data allows for mixin programming, which is very useful. If you don't give OOP programmers the tools for mixing programming, they will find some other way to do it, such as some unattractive design pattern that fills their code with boilerplate, secondary objects, and unnecessary additional run-time switching and whatnot, all of which can be as brittle as any inheritance hierarchy, if not more.

byt143 7y ago

This can be done better with traits in Julia, which are more powerful, safer and faster. See here: https://white.ucc.asn.au/2018/10/03/Dispatch,-Traits-and-Metaprogramming-Over-Reflection.html https://white.ucc.asn.au/2018/10/03/Dispatch,-Traits-and-Met...

tgflynn 7y ago
Perhaps. The feeling I get with Julia is that the devs are sort of making it up as they go along. I don't mean just making up the language (which of course they're doing), but making up whole new approaches to programming that aren't necessarily well-understood and tested in the real world and certainly aren't very familiar to most programmers. Maybe in the end they will succeed and will invent a generally superior approach to software development. But for the moment it all feels very experimental and so not a language I'd want to commit to at present if I were starting a major, non-solo project.
- chalst 7y ago
  A lot of the ideas come from Common Lisp.

oxinabox 7y ago

Generally via wrapping (Composition). ``` struct Foo <: AbstractFoo ... end struct SpecialFoo{T<:AbstractFoo} <: AbstractFoo backing::T end ``` and then delegating calls to the wrapped object

tgflynn 7y ago
Yes, but delegation requires a lot of extra code to get what you have for free in a class based language. And yes I know you can probably write macros to handle much of that but having to use meta-programming to get what other languages give you for free doesn't seem ideal to me.
- mindB 7y ago
  If using meta-programming to get "basic" features rubs you the wrong way, the language might just not be for you. In general, the Julia philosophy (as well as the lisp philosophy from which Julia descends) is that things which can be done efficiently using macros instead of being built-in should be done with macros. Language features are only for things that cannot be accomplished via metaprogramming. As far as actual implementations of method-forwarding macros, there's an implementation in Lazy.jl[1], and TypedDelegation.jl[2]. [1] https://github.com/MikeInnes/Lazy.jl/blob/0de1643f37555396d615e825fb17b73edb0b5939/src/macros.jl#L275 https://github.com/MikeInnes/Lazy.jl/blob/0de1643f37555396d6... [2] https://github.com/JeffreySarnoff/TypedDelegation.jl https://github.com/JeffreySarnoff/TypedDelegation.jl
  - oxinabox 7y ago
    I have concluded that it is basically impossible to write a general purpose delegation macro. I have seen many and alway immediately run into cases they can't handle. A top level `for m in (:foo, :bar); @eval $m(X::MyType) = $m(X.backing)` Is general and has no performance overhead
    - mindB 7y ago
      To be honest, I've never found the need for delegating a huge number of methods in my own work, but then I've never wanted to add a feature or field to something as complex and featureful as e.g. a DataFrame. What issues have you run into when using method-forwarding/delegation macros? The nice thing about the Julia ecosystem is that people tend to be pretty willing to step back and define their methods in terms of an interface (Tables.jl in this case) which then allows code reuse without brittle delegation. Having to put so much effort into changing the structure of upstream doesn't seem ideal from a composability perspective though.

cultus 7y ago

Single-dispatch OOP dispatches (implicitly) only on the first argument, self. That is how Class B can provide the functionality of A. Multiple dispatch can dispatch on all arguments. Thus, OOP single dispatch is a special case of multiple dispatch. In your example, functionality in class B can be written simply as ordinary generic functions, which are inferred to their most general compatible type without annotations. Because of this, all functionality for class A will work for class B, as long as B is a superset of A. Not a single line of code, and no brittle inheritance hierarchies. Multiple dispatch is one solution to the expression problem, which both OOP and functional programming suffer from in dual ways. Other ones include Haskell's typeclasses and Ruby's mixins.

tgflynn 7y ago
Yes, but in Julia the problem is that inheritance isn't allowed from concrete types. So this example in Julia would mean that A is an abstract type whose objects can contain no data. So you have to figure out a way to implement functionality on A without having any data to work with. There are several ways to work around this but they all involve considerably more code complexity than would be required in a language like C++ that supports classes.
- oivey 7y ago
  It’s maybe less of a problem than you think. If you simply want to call a method on two different types you can often just do it. Type annotations generally don’t help with performance, and any type checking is only going to happen at run time anyway. Inheritance does help with documenting what functions are compatible with what types. I think that could be better in Julia, and things like abstract type hierarchies and traits help a bit. Concrete inheritance could be nice, but that seems to also enable some pretty bad OOP practices.