8 ms·

I am a strong proponent of not using anything that forces you to use OOP as "baby's 1st language". Well I see OOP as a heresy in general tho. To me programming

I am a strong proponent of not using anything that forces you to use OOP as "baby's 1st language". Well I see OOP as a heresy in general tho. To me programming is about algorithms and data structures and data flow. Not some strange concept of OOP that does not even have an exact definition and you can see some extremists claiming that literally everything is OOP.

71a54xd 5y ago
My first true language was learning C in college, I'd definitely do that again. When I switched to CS everything was scheme (lisp) based which I actually preferred to Python and later on was mostly Java based. I still hate Java but it's gotten me through interview / interview screens so I'm okay with it now. For me, first language should be strict and not too loose with the rules (so not python). Once you've got the rules down and understand why they are there / why certain languages use those constructs - build from there. But take all of this with a grain of salt because I was a very distracted student more interested in working for startups during college than graduating with a nice GPA ;)
bigodbiel 5y ago
If you want to go maverick, why not LISP?
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Too many parentheses.
  - floatboth 5y ago
    Come on, that's not a real problem ;) As someone who had a Clojure phase about 9 years ago: the actual problem with modern Lisps is that they don't really offer a big set of unique good features. The basic functional map-filter-reduce "meat grinder" is everywhere (and has been almost everywhere for a long time, Java not having lambdas for ages is what clouded everyone's vision into thinking that's not the case). The other "Lisp feature" is macro metaprogramming based on homoiconicity (Code Is Data™) and we have it in some non-Lisps too now (hello Elixir) and… is it really the best way to do metaprogramming? Ehh. Well, many compiled&typed languages actually do similar-ish things: using syn in Rust proc macros / haskell-src-exts in Template Haskell you can work with code "as data". And that isn't as nice to work with as D's `static foreach/if` + reflection/introspecion thingies like allMembers/getMember.
    - User23 5y ago
      Clojure is a sort of baby’s first lisp. That’s not a bad thing by the way. Its relative simplicity and restrictiveness are usually beneficial for corporate environments and I like working in it. That said, if you want to talk about lisp you should really talk about Common Lisp. And there are a lot of solid criticisms of Common Lisp, but not enough features isn’t one I’ve heard before. The LOOP facility alone has an absurd number of features, to say nothing of the Meta Object Protocol. It’s fair to say that a proficient Lisper can write performant code in any set of paradigms you like using a modern Common Lisp implementation. That comes with some considerable trade-offs though.
  - User23 5y ago
    I can’t tell if you’re joking, but you did make me laugh.
  - chriswarbo 5y ago
    Parentheses aren't required for Lisp, since there are many alternative representations http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-08-29-s_expressions.html http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-08-29-s_expressions.html
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      > many alternative representations If people feel regularly compelled to redo the syntax, there's something wrong with it. "Many" means balkanization, which is another problem. (D has some carefully designed points which discourage balkanization.) It goes back to too many parentheses. So I'm only half joking about it.
bell-cot 5y ago
Ah...isn't D close enough to being a superset of C that it's perfectly usable as a non-OOP language, in educational contexts?
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Yes, it is. And you don't have to suffer under a preprocessor! (It's impractical to program in C without using the preprocessor, and the preprocessor requires use of a lot of very outdated programming practices.) D can be used in "BetterC" mode, where it operates as what C could be with modern sensibilities.
- alphaglosined 5y ago
  Unless you are touching something like threads or exceptions, you probably won't use classes unless it expresses your data best. So yes, perfectly usable without OOP or classes.
nick__m 5y ago
from the article: To that end, I’ve left out a lot of the advanced features (so far), such as: Templates Type inference Operator overloading Overloading in general! __traits Classes/Interfaces/OOP Pointers/references (mostly) Memory management in general (thank you GC!)
- Jach 5y ago
  I have no teaching experience to back it up yet I've always felt this approach of intentionally leaving out very nifty, useful, and sometimes important bits of knowledge is bad. For sure, in the scope of one class there's not enough time to thoroughly teach everything and test on it, tradeoffs have to be made, but I'd still rather instructors explicitly mention such things as briefly as they can get away with (but three times) just with the expectation that not everyone is going to really even 'get' them and it won't be on any tests. People very much go with what they know (you'll find bubble sort in production software, alas) and if you don't even give them a sign for "here's something you might want to explore on your own or come back to if you run into it again later" most won't set foot beyond their present understanding. The worst offender in this sort of omission I think comes from the excellent SICP book -- it's not the book's fault, it's not even really trying to "teach Lisp", but people nevertheless use the book and as a side effect learn a bit of Scheme, which they confuse (because no one told them otherwise) for thinking that they now know Lisp. But they don't. In order to know Lisp one needs to learn Common Lisp with its macros, its OOP, its condition system, its types (which SBCL can check at compile time and use for more optimized assembly), its packages, its approach to interactive development... It's the same issue as high school C++ courses (I assume some of them are still around!) teaching it as C with classes, and never hearing about (let alone touching), say, templates, let alone any of the modern C++0x and on features.
WalterBright 5y ago
Although D supports the OOP paradigm, it does not require it at all. Very little of the D standard library uses OOP, for example.
schaefer 5y ago
"I see OOP as a heresy in general" Rndm_access, I know everyone is entitled to their opinion, but can I probe a bit on this? Can you tell us about the largest code base you feel productive in? How about the largest code base you love? How many lines of code are they? How many active developers do those code bases have (i.e. developers with weekly commits)? Do you have trouble staffing new engineers? Thanks for any reply given.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  I don't know what "heresy in general" means regarding a programming language feature, but I dislike OOP in Java and C++ code where I have encountered it. The largest code base I love and feel productive in is Linux kernel which is mostly C and assembly, medium sized project of 30 million lines, probably less than ten thousand active developers (although difficult to judge with the way development on certain features or functions can occur for years on private repositories before being merged), I would say relatively high rate of change for a project of the size.
  - vgel 5y ago
    My impression of the Linux kernel was that it uses a fair amount of OOP via manually-written vtables, though? For example: http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v2.6.39/include/linux/fs.h#L1569 http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v2.6.39/include/linux/fs.h#L1569
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      It frequently has structures containing objects of different types that have to identify themselves so they can be processed in different ways. This general pattern, and function pointers in C predates formal "OOP" of course, so I don't call it manually-written vtables. But yes it has this and it is a good technique. OOP languages which do this automatically for you is AFAIKS just a thin and often clunky layer of syntactic sugar on top of it.
      - 5y ago
floatboth 5y ago
> claiming that literally everything is OOP Well, "is" is quite the load-bearing word in those claims. I think it is kinda true in the sense that lots of things can be represented as OOP. A great example is how Scala represents ML-style ADTs as sealed class hierarchies.
anta40 5y ago
For beginners, Smalltalk is totally out of question, then? :D

71a54xd 5y ago

My first true language was learning C in college, I'd definitely do that again. When I switched to CS everything was scheme (lisp) based which I actually preferred to Python and later on was mostly Java based. I still hate Java but it's gotten me through interview / interview screens so I'm okay with it now. For me, first language should be strict and not too loose with the rules (so not python). Once you've got the rules down and understand why they are there / why certain languages use those constructs - build from there. But take all of this with a grain of salt because I was a very distracted student more interested in working for startups during college than graduating with a nice GPA ;)

bigodbiel 5y ago

If you want to go maverick, why not LISP?

WalterBright 5y ago
Too many parentheses.
- floatboth 5y ago
  Come on, that's not a real problem ;) As someone who had a Clojure phase about 9 years ago: the actual problem with modern Lisps is that they don't really offer a big set of unique good features. The basic functional map-filter-reduce "meat grinder" is everywhere (and has been almost everywhere for a long time, Java not having lambdas for ages is what clouded everyone's vision into thinking that's not the case). The other "Lisp feature" is macro metaprogramming based on homoiconicity (Code Is Data™) and we have it in some non-Lisps too now (hello Elixir) and… is it really the best way to do metaprogramming? Ehh. Well, many compiled&typed languages actually do similar-ish things: using syn in Rust proc macros / haskell-src-exts in Template Haskell you can work with code "as data". And that isn't as nice to work with as D's `static foreach/if` + reflection/introspecion thingies like allMembers/getMember.
  - User23 5y ago
    Clojure is a sort of baby’s first lisp. That’s not a bad thing by the way. Its relative simplicity and restrictiveness are usually beneficial for corporate environments and I like working in it. That said, if you want to talk about lisp you should really talk about Common Lisp. And there are a lot of solid criticisms of Common Lisp, but not enough features isn’t one I’ve heard before. The LOOP facility alone has an absurd number of features, to say nothing of the Meta Object Protocol. It’s fair to say that a proficient Lisper can write performant code in any set of paradigms you like using a modern Common Lisp implementation. That comes with some considerable trade-offs though.
- User23 5y ago
  I can’t tell if you’re joking, but you did make me laugh.
- chriswarbo 5y ago
  Parentheses aren't required for Lisp, since there are many alternative representations http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-08-29-s_expressions.html http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-08-29-s_expressions.html
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > many alternative representations If people feel regularly compelled to redo the syntax, there's something wrong with it. "Many" means balkanization, which is another problem. (D has some carefully designed points which discourage balkanization.) It goes back to too many parentheses. So I'm only half joking about it.

bell-cot 5y ago

Ah...isn't D close enough to being a superset of C that it's perfectly usable as a non-OOP language, in educational contexts?

WalterBright 5y ago
Yes, it is. And you don't have to suffer under a preprocessor! (It's impractical to program in C without using the preprocessor, and the preprocessor requires use of a lot of very outdated programming practices.) D can be used in "BetterC" mode, where it operates as what C could be with modern sensibilities.
alphaglosined 5y ago
Unless you are touching something like threads or exceptions, you probably won't use classes unless it expresses your data best. So yes, perfectly usable without OOP or classes.

nick__m 5y ago

from the article: To that end, I’ve left out a lot of the advanced features (so far), such as: Templates Type inference Operator overloading Overloading in general! __traits Classes/Interfaces/OOP Pointers/references (mostly) Memory management in general (thank you GC!)

Jach 5y ago
I have no teaching experience to back it up yet I've always felt this approach of intentionally leaving out very nifty, useful, and sometimes important bits of knowledge is bad. For sure, in the scope of one class there's not enough time to thoroughly teach everything and test on it, tradeoffs have to be made, but I'd still rather instructors explicitly mention such things as briefly as they can get away with (but three times) just with the expectation that not everyone is going to really even 'get' them and it won't be on any tests. People very much go with what they know (you'll find bubble sort in production software, alas) and if you don't even give them a sign for "here's something you might want to explore on your own or come back to if you run into it again later" most won't set foot beyond their present understanding. The worst offender in this sort of omission I think comes from the excellent SICP book -- it's not the book's fault, it's not even really trying to "teach Lisp", but people nevertheless use the book and as a side effect learn a bit of Scheme, which they confuse (because no one told them otherwise) for thinking that they now know Lisp. But they don't. In order to know Lisp one needs to learn Common Lisp with its macros, its OOP, its condition system, its types (which SBCL can check at compile time and use for more optimized assembly), its packages, its approach to interactive development... It's the same issue as high school C++ courses (I assume some of them are still around!) teaching it as C with classes, and never hearing about (let alone touching), say, templates, let alone any of the modern C++0x and on features.

WalterBright 5y ago

Although D supports the OOP paradigm, it does not require it at all. Very little of the D standard library uses OOP, for example.

schaefer 5y ago

"I see OOP as a heresy in general" Rndm_access, I know everyone is entitled to their opinion, but can I probe a bit on this? Can you tell us about the largest code base you feel productive in? How about the largest code base you love? How many lines of code are they? How many active developers do those code bases have (i.e. developers with weekly commits)? Do you have trouble staffing new engineers? Thanks for any reply given.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
I don't know what "heresy in general" means regarding a programming language feature, but I dislike OOP in Java and C++ code where I have encountered it. The largest code base I love and feel productive in is Linux kernel which is mostly C and assembly, medium sized project of 30 million lines, probably less than ten thousand active developers (although difficult to judge with the way development on certain features or functions can occur for years on private repositories before being merged), I would say relatively high rate of change for a project of the size.
- vgel 5y ago
  My impression of the Linux kernel was that it uses a fair amount of OOP via manually-written vtables, though? For example: http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v2.6.39/include/linux/fs.h#L1569 http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v2.6.39/include/linux/fs.h#L1569
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    It frequently has structures containing objects of different types that have to identify themselves so they can be processed in different ways. This general pattern, and function pointers in C predates formal "OOP" of course, so I don't call it manually-written vtables. But yes it has this and it is a good technique. OOP languages which do this automatically for you is AFAIKS just a thin and often clunky layer of syntactic sugar on top of it.
    - 5y ago

floatboth 5y ago

> claiming that literally everything is OOP Well, "is" is quite the load-bearing word in those claims. I think it is kinda true in the sense that lots of things can be represented as OOP. A great example is how Scala represents ML-style ADTs as sealed class hierarchies.

anta40 5y ago

For beginners, Smalltalk is totally out of question, then? :D