4 ms·

In my opinion, objects conflate entirely too much and lead to tangled code, especially if there is any data transformation involved. Have you seen Simple Made E

by djacobs 15y ago

In my opinion, objects conflate entirely too much and lead to tangled code, especially if there is any data transformation involved. Have you seen Simple Made Easy? [0] [0] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

palish 15y ago
For an excellent example of how a clean object model can solve extremely difficult technical problems, check out LMAX's "Disruptor" framework: http://code.google.com/p/disruptor/ http://code.google.com/p/disruptor/ By rigorously separating the concerns into a clean object model, LMAX achieved a level of performance which might correctly be labeled "miraculous". http://screencast.com/t/g67kFj8nRue http://screencast.com/t/g67kFj8nRue It's written in pure Java. Amazingly, I haven't found anything that's achieved better performance thus far. It's very elegant.
- bengl3rt 15y ago
  That was an incredible read. Thanks for the link.
- ntoshev 15y ago
  OOP has nothing to do with the Disruptor pattern achieving that performance. I agree the concept is elegant, but I don't think the Java framework implementing it is. You can see a less general benchmark done in far less code in Go and C++: https://gist.github.com/1218360 https://gist.github.com/1218360 (and discussion http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/thread/c47af0b94e5f9539 http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/thr... )
- silentbicycle 15y ago
  No, the whole point is that they're getting major speed-ups by using arrays and a giant ring buffer to avoid object allocation, reduce garbage collection, and improve cache behavior. They're writing really tightly optimized C. In Java.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
drostie 15y ago
I will say this: the reason I keep coming back from Lisp (and PHP) to JavaScript and Python is that I can do lots of functional things in the latter, but I get that gosh-darn useful little dot operator. Here are some of the many ways to silence someone who is shouting in all caps: (string-downcase yelling) ; common lisp strtolower($yelling) // php yelling.toLowerCase() // js lc($yelling) # perl yelling.lower() # python I don't really care about the parens and where they are, but the fact that clisp, php, and perl put this function in the global namespace bugs me to no end. It's a function which only makes sense when you have a string. Other things don't have the sort of "case" such that you could "lowercase" them.
- mattdeboard 15y ago
  Curious then how you feel about `sorted()` being in the global namespace. Point being I don't understand how `.lower()` et al., being class methods instead of global functions is an argument for the greatness of Python. Ultimately the responsibility is yours for invoking it in the right place with the right type of object, no matter where you put the parens.
  - drostie 15y ago
    In Python that actually makes some amount of sense, because Python ships with something like five different sorts of lists (arrays, lists, tuples, OrderedDicts, generators) and it's a reasonably generic idea. And it helps that for the one 'proper' case of this, lists, Python also supports list.sort(), so that "it is where it's supposed to be" as well. The only problem with list.sort() in Python is that it's void; it returns None. It should either return self (and sort self) or return a sorted copy of self, like sorted() will. On the other hand, in JavaScript, array.sort() is known to be a little broken: > [48, 19, 7, 14, 30, 22, 45].sort() [14, 19, 22, 30, 45, 48, 7] Wat. It's true that I have ultimate responsibility for my code, and it's true that in Python I can write: x = 3 x.lower() ...and unlike Java it will not complain that it has no idea how to "lower" 3. But it still suggests like Java suggests that we're going to narrow down the wildly branching tree of possibilities. When I'm sitting in the Python REPL, and I have an object x, I'll often just call dir(x), to see what I can do with it. What would Common Lisp tell me? It would kindly tell me that it's syntactically valid to call (string-downcase 3), even though that will produce a noisy error. So if I wanted to list all of the things I can do with 3, we would be here for a long time.
bwarp 15y ago
This actually only happens if you don't think first or don't understand ever. Thinking and understanding takes more time than programming in my experience. The same level of fail will accumulate regardless of the language if you don't know what you are doing.

by djacobs 15y ago

palish 15y ago

For an excellent example of how a clean object model can solve extremely difficult technical problems, check out LMAX's "Disruptor" framework: http://code.google.com/p/disruptor/ http://code.google.com/p/disruptor/ By rigorously separating the concerns into a clean object model, LMAX achieved a level of performance which might correctly be labeled "miraculous". http://screencast.com/t/g67kFj8nRue http://screencast.com/t/g67kFj8nRue It's written in pure Java. Amazingly, I haven't found anything that's achieved better performance thus far. It's very elegant.

bengl3rt 15y ago
That was an incredible read. Thanks for the link.
ntoshev 15y ago
OOP has nothing to do with the Disruptor pattern achieving that performance. I agree the concept is elegant, but I don't think the Java framework implementing it is. You can see a less general benchmark done in far less code in Go and C++: https://gist.github.com/1218360 https://gist.github.com/1218360 (and discussion http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/thread/c47af0b94e5f9539 http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/thr... )
silentbicycle 15y ago
No, the whole point is that they're getting major speed-ups by using arrays and a giant ring buffer to avoid object allocation, reduce garbage collection, and improve cache behavior. They're writing really tightly optimized C. In Java.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

drostie 15y ago

I will say this: the reason I keep coming back from Lisp (and PHP) to JavaScript and Python is that I can do lots of functional things in the latter, but I get that gosh-darn useful little dot operator. Here are some of the many ways to silence someone who is shouting in all caps: (string-downcase yelling) ; common lisp strtolower($yelling) // php yelling.toLowerCase() // js lc($yelling) # perl yelling.lower() # python I don't really care about the parens and where they are, but the fact that clisp, php, and perl put this function in the global namespace bugs me to no end. It's a function which only makes sense when you have a string. Other things don't have the sort of "case" such that you could "lowercase" them.

mattdeboard 15y ago
Curious then how you feel about `sorted()` being in the global namespace. Point being I don't understand how `.lower()` et al., being class methods instead of global functions is an argument for the greatness of Python. Ultimately the responsibility is yours for invoking it in the right place with the right type of object, no matter where you put the parens.
- drostie 15y ago
  In Python that actually makes some amount of sense, because Python ships with something like five different sorts of lists (arrays, lists, tuples, OrderedDicts, generators) and it's a reasonably generic idea. And it helps that for the one 'proper' case of this, lists, Python also supports list.sort(), so that "it is where it's supposed to be" as well. The only problem with list.sort() in Python is that it's void; it returns None. It should either return self (and sort self) or return a sorted copy of self, like sorted() will. On the other hand, in JavaScript, array.sort() is known to be a little broken: > [48, 19, 7, 14, 30, 22, 45].sort() [14, 19, 22, 30, 45, 48, 7] Wat. It's true that I have ultimate responsibility for my code, and it's true that in Python I can write: x = 3 x.lower() ...and unlike Java it will not complain that it has no idea how to "lower" 3. But it still suggests like Java suggests that we're going to narrow down the wildly branching tree of possibilities. When I'm sitting in the Python REPL, and I have an object x, I'll often just call dir(x), to see what I can do with it. What would Common Lisp tell me? It would kindly tell me that it's syntactically valid to call (string-downcase 3), even though that will produce a noisy error. So if I wanted to list all of the things I can do with 3, we would be here for a long time.

bwarp 15y ago

This actually only happens if you don't think first or don't understand ever. Thinking and understanding takes more time than programming in my experience. The same level of fail will accumulate regardless of the language if you don't know what you are doing.