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OO was the best programming paradigm until people recognized the power of concurrency. Even in the usecase of GUI programming, where OO is supposed to shine the

OO was the best programming paradigm until people recognized the power of concurrency. Even in the usecase of GUI programming, where OO is supposed to shine the brightest, OO is a failure because interactive programs are extremely concurrent. Even back then when everything was executed in serial GUI frameworks were designed concurrently in crummy languages never designed to support concurrent programming such as C. Or worse, C++. And functional programming is no good as a general programming paradigm because: 1. Little of computing--almost nothing--is declarative. That means functional programming's non-general by definition. 2. Programming cannot be married to mathematics despite what formal proof proponents and people who think naming their language "Pascal" is a good idea think. It will always be an arranged and sham marriage. 3. Thinking being able to easily execute your declarative programs in parallel means you'll never have to think concurrently and can just outsource everything to Hadoop only means you can't understand the difference between parallelism and concurrency.

jcelerier 6y ago
> Even in the usecase of GUI programming, where OO is supposed to shine the brightest, OO is a failure because interactive programs are extremely concurrent. Even back then when everything was executed in serial GUI frameworks were designed concurrently in crummy languages never designed to support concurrent programming such as C. Or worse, C++. I must say that I have trouble reconciling this with the fact that every single GUI program running on my computer right now is written mostly in C++ with a bit in C for my WM and a bit of Rust for Firefox.
jbverschoor 6y ago
Messagepassing and poking around in objects is awesome. But more from a user developer point of view. Power user.. power users aren’t here anymore
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
> OO was the best programming paradigm No, it depends on what you're doing. Always does, always will. > Even in ... GUI programming, ... OO is a failure because interactive programs are extremely concurrent Seems to work well for me on windows. What's the problem precisely? > And functional programming is no good as a general programming paradigm because ... Little of computing--almost nothing--is declarative That's just wrong. > Programming cannot be married to mathematics... You give no evidence despite it being a long association. > Thinking being able to easily execute your declarative programs in parallel means you'll never have to think concurrently Yes, because concurrency only becomes an obvious issue when state is involved. So FP sidesteps that by not having interacting state. I have some criticisms of FP but this is plain silly. You're just dissing stuff here. It's annoying.
- Konohamaru 6y ago
  > Little of computing--almost nothing--is declarative... That's just wrong. * Artificial general intelligence * Operating systems * Video games * Emulators for hardware * Interpreters * Debuggers * Word editors * Image editors * Graphical user interfaces * Robotics * Web browsers * Servers Basically everything that makes computing interesting is non-declarative and concurrent. Financial math on K street, parser combinators, and SQL queries are the declarative segment of programming.
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    OK, good comeback. It's forcing me to be precise. Declarative/imperative are models, not necessarily implementations (although they often are treated as model x = implementation x). You need to separate the two conceptually, but in implementation you can do both. Anything you can do declaratively you can do imperatively and the reverse. As such it makes it meaningless to say that almost nothing is declarative because how you choose to create it is a choice. How well it runs is another matter because real hardware is relentlessly state-y, but that's an implementation issue. And that's fine, and sometimes imperative stuff is just cleaner. But you can write a web browser or a GUI or whatever declaratively, but underneath it will be imperative because that's hardware. Declarative vs imperative is a choice, not necessarily a 'natural' thing, (depending on the problem, I'd say a web page renderer is distinctly stateless - take some static HTNL, render it, where's the state?). A web server can be stateless too, a request comes in, a web page goes out. I need someone else to speak for others, pretty sure stateless GUIs have been written. Any big data cruncher that works on petabytes, purely with output coming from input deterministically is effectively stateless.
    - jolux 6y ago
      Nothing is declarative or imperative outside of a certain implementation of a solution. All of the things named trivially have declarative solutions because of Turing completeness. Whether or not a paradigm lends itself easily to something is a bit of a different question, but I think a lot of people tend to say “oh, that’s obviously stateful and imperative” merely because they haven’t thought about the problem in a different way.
discreteevent 6y ago
OO has had most success in GUI programming. As for concurrency, Erlang seems to do ok and its creator called it "possibly the only object-oriented language"
pjmlp 6y ago
Interesting given that many of the original problems that were tackled with OOP were precisely concurrency and distributed computing. Even the Xerox manuals contain several examples.

jcelerier 6y ago

> Even in the usecase of GUI programming, where OO is supposed to shine the brightest, OO is a failure because interactive programs are extremely concurrent. Even back then when everything was executed in serial GUI frameworks were designed concurrently in crummy languages never designed to support concurrent programming such as C. Or worse, C++. I must say that I have trouble reconciling this with the fact that every single GUI program running on my computer right now is written mostly in C++ with a bit in C for my WM and a bit of Rust for Firefox.

jbverschoor 6y ago

Messagepassing and poking around in objects is awesome. But more from a user developer point of view. Power user.. power users aren’t here anymore

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

> OO was the best programming paradigm No, it depends on what you're doing. Always does, always will. > Even in ... GUI programming, ... OO is a failure because interactive programs are extremely concurrent Seems to work well for me on windows. What's the problem precisely? > And functional programming is no good as a general programming paradigm because ... Little of computing--almost nothing--is declarative That's just wrong. > Programming cannot be married to mathematics... You give no evidence despite it being a long association. > Thinking being able to easily execute your declarative programs in parallel means you'll never have to think concurrently Yes, because concurrency only becomes an obvious issue when state is involved. So FP sidesteps that by not having interacting state. I have some criticisms of FP but this is plain silly. You're just dissing stuff here. It's annoying.

Konohamaru 6y ago
> Little of computing--almost nothing--is declarative... That's just wrong. * Artificial general intelligence * Operating systems * Video games * Emulators for hardware * Interpreters * Debuggers * Word editors * Image editors * Graphical user interfaces * Robotics * Web browsers * Servers Basically everything that makes computing interesting is non-declarative and concurrent. Financial math on K street, parser combinators, and SQL queries are the declarative segment of programming.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  OK, good comeback. It's forcing me to be precise. Declarative/imperative are models, not necessarily implementations (although they often are treated as model x = implementation x). You need to separate the two conceptually, but in implementation you can do both. Anything you can do declaratively you can do imperatively and the reverse. As such it makes it meaningless to say that almost nothing is declarative because how you choose to create it is a choice. How well it runs is another matter because real hardware is relentlessly state-y, but that's an implementation issue. And that's fine, and sometimes imperative stuff is just cleaner. But you can write a web browser or a GUI or whatever declaratively, but underneath it will be imperative because that's hardware. Declarative vs imperative is a choice, not necessarily a 'natural' thing, (depending on the problem, I'd say a web page renderer is distinctly stateless - take some static HTNL, render it, where's the state?). A web server can be stateless too, a request comes in, a web page goes out. I need someone else to speak for others, pretty sure stateless GUIs have been written. Any big data cruncher that works on petabytes, purely with output coming from input deterministically is effectively stateless.
  - jolux 6y ago
    Nothing is declarative or imperative outside of a certain implementation of a solution. All of the things named trivially have declarative solutions because of Turing completeness. Whether or not a paradigm lends itself easily to something is a bit of a different question, but I think a lot of people tend to say “oh, that’s obviously stateful and imperative” merely because they haven’t thought about the problem in a different way.

discreteevent 6y ago

OO has had most success in GUI programming. As for concurrency, Erlang seems to do ok and its creator called it "possibly the only object-oriented language"

pjmlp 6y ago

Interesting given that many of the original problems that were tackled with OOP were precisely concurrency and distributed computing. Even the Xerox manuals contain several examples.