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> You’re totally missing the point. Erlang is more “message passing” than any OOP language I’ve ever used. My point is that OOP is not about message passing. Y

> You’re totally missing the point. Erlang is more “message passing” than any OOP language I’ve ever used. My point is that OOP is not about message passing. You say that Erlang is more about message passing than OOP languages are, aren't we exactly in agreement here? Also, it was the post I responded to that referenced actors, I'm not jumping to anything.

slver 5y ago
Your problem is that you tried to argue that the original definition of OOP is not "helpful", because mainstream languages implement synchronous messaging. And to you synchronous messaging is not messaging. However (1) synchronous messaging IS messaging (2) we are moving to asynchrony. So the original definition of OOP is still the overarching theme of programming today, and it's quite helpful because those same mainstream messages are evolving to asynchrony, now as IO and cross-process and cross-machine communication has become the norm. Your limited mental model of objects just being structs with procedures works in the 90s, but it'll be detrimental when you design any system today, because you often need to be ready about asynchrony, redundancy, resiliency and non-immediate results at your module's boundaries. Basically you've focused too much on a few trees and you've missed the forest. But those trees are just happenstance, and the forest (the entire "OOP" with its implementation hiding, polymorphism and message passing) is the important paradigm and it's what everything is moving towards. At the low level, you can still think about objects as just Abstract Data Types. But that doesn't give you working systems at scale. It gives you just a set of data primitives to get started with.
- codeflo 5y ago
  I'm not claiming that message passing has no role in distributed system design, of course it does. I'm just saying that message passing is not how OO languages typically work. To me, it seems like you're arguing that having a less accurate (I'm sorry, less "limited") understanding of actual language semantics (that it's just "message passing") somehow helps you design distributed systems. In my experience, the opposite tends to be the case.
  - slver 5y ago
    Don't confuse language semantics with language implementation. Case in point SmallTalk does actually use message passing. So does Obj C and Swift. The compiler can often optimize those to either virtual or direct calls, because that's simply more efficient. And once again, synchronous message passing doesn't mean it's not message passing. You just gotta get your terms and frame right.

slver 5y ago

Your problem is that you tried to argue that the original definition of OOP is not "helpful", because mainstream languages implement synchronous messaging. And to you synchronous messaging is not messaging. However (1) synchronous messaging IS messaging (2) we are moving to asynchrony. So the original definition of OOP is still the overarching theme of programming today, and it's quite helpful because those same mainstream messages are evolving to asynchrony, now as IO and cross-process and cross-machine communication has become the norm. Your limited mental model of objects just being structs with procedures works in the 90s, but it'll be detrimental when you design any system today, because you often need to be ready about asynchrony, redundancy, resiliency and non-immediate results at your module's boundaries. Basically you've focused too much on a few trees and you've missed the forest. But those trees are just happenstance, and the forest (the entire "OOP" with its implementation hiding, polymorphism and message passing) is the important paradigm and it's what everything is moving towards. At the low level, you can still think about objects as just Abstract Data Types. But that doesn't give you working systems at scale. It gives you just a set of data primitives to get started with.

codeflo 5y ago
I'm not claiming that message passing has no role in distributed system design, of course it does. I'm just saying that message passing is not how OO languages typically work. To me, it seems like you're arguing that having a less accurate (I'm sorry, less "limited") understanding of actual language semantics (that it's just "message passing") somehow helps you design distributed systems. In my experience, the opposite tends to be the case.
- slver 5y ago
  Don't confuse language semantics with language implementation. Case in point SmallTalk does actually use message passing. So does Obj C and Swift. The compiler can often optimize those to either virtual or direct calls, because that's simply more efficient. And once again, synchronous message passing doesn't mean it's not message passing. You just gotta get your terms and frame right.