7 ms·

The many "you're wrong if you believe that" made me remember the anecdote of Alan Kay attending some conference about OOP and saying that it was wrong, that he

by narag 3y ago

The many "you're wrong if you believe that" made me remember the anecdote of Alan Kay attending some conference about OOP and saying that it was wrong, that he invented OOP and it was not like that. IIRC, Kay's vision is that OOP is about messages. I have my own pet theory, of course it must be wrong too, but if I may, only as food for thought: The core usefulness of OOP is usability. A language is a matter of connecting thoughts through a mental model. Subject, verb, predicate. Object, method, parameters. That's mostly it. The rest are implementation details and lots of bikeshedding.

arethuza 3y ago
What about things like CLOS where you have multi-methods and dispatching is done based on the type of all arguments?
- mistrial9 3y ago
  combine a type system with dispatch logic, using abstractions .. it is very clear for some engineering applications and/or tinkertoys. Many people can get the basic ideas with thirty minutes of introduction.
- narag 3y ago
  I haven't used it, so not sure if it fits the pattern, but the question for me is: is it useful, time-saving, more usable? does it make the task more clear for the programmer that uses it?
  - jghn 3y ago
    It depends. It is a fundamentally different branch of the OOP family tree than what most people are used to seeing. Enough so that I've seen people declare it to *not be OOP*. So if you stumble across the model having only seen the style of OOP popularized by C++ and later Java, no. You will probably *not* find it to be liberating. The idea is that you have classes which model state. And then you have generics that model functionality. And you define methods which provide an implementation of the generic for a class. But it's more flexible than what you see in Java because such a method can be easily added after the fact as it's not intrinsically part of the class' definition. If you're familiar at all with Typeclasses in Haskell & Scala, personally I find those to be similar enough to get the gist. Likewise Dylan and R's S4 objects are modeled after CLOS' structure.
- whartung 3y ago
  Runtime, multi-method dispatch is probably the singular thing that stands out as "missing" from other systems. I don't miss it a lot, but there have certainly been times when I have. I also enjoyed the ability to not be locked into the rigor of a class structure when it comes to methods. Since CLOS is function based, it's trivial to add functions to a class that you don't even have the source code to. There have been many times working with a 3rd party or system library where I've had that "if only I had this little method" moment that would make my life easier. I'd rather have that capability and fight, say, namespace issues for the "Well what if everyone added their own 'upshiftFirstLetter' method to the String class" problems on an ad hoc basis. Part of this, of course, stems from the locked down nature of the scope of classes. Not having access to internal structures and state. I'd rather take those risks of leveraging internal state knowledge not supported by the original designer vs the alternatives of sometimes having to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jghn 3y ago
> IIRC, Kay's vision is that OOP is about messages. Yes. The actor model is closer to what Kay proposed than the C++/Java style of OOP.
padobson 3y ago
The core usefulness of OOP is usability. This is the reason I find it useful. To me, OOP is as much about your organization as it is about the best way to load, transform, present, edit, and store data. I think the culture of some companies lends itself to various kinds of programming, but it's the cultureless companies where OOP is most useful. The places where nobody is trying to change the world, where people work to pay their mortgages, where an executive may only work for two years and a programmer may only work for six months. It's in an environment like that where a self-documenting, self-configuring code base with custom classes and exceptions that guide the next developer is essential. Every developer should have two users in mind. The person using the software, and the next developer who maintains the software after you're gone. OOP is a great way to empower the second user when the only thing that will reliably outlive the developer is the code base.
- Consultant32452 3y ago
  I want to second the idea that the primary benefit of OOP is logical organization. For smaller projects I don't care one way or another about OOP practices, but once you start getting into hundreds of thousands of lines of code IMO it becomes an absolute necessity.
  - zero_shift 3y ago
    But we don't need classes, vector tables, or other runtime features to achieve organisation. We just need our compiler to recognise namespaces. "module Foo where"
    - Consultant32452 3y ago
      Encapsulation helps the signal to noise ratio. If I create a REST API no one complains they don't have access to the inner-workings, local variables, etc. But if I give a similar experience and call it a "class" suddenly it's ugly and mean.
      - MrJohz 3y ago
thumbuddy 3y ago
Everything is wrong or illfitting. I mean we are making tiny blocks of silicon do extreme amounts of human work, while being entertained with music and videos. OOP is like five abstractions deeper than what it intend to model. It's a tool, I wish people stopped trying to make the extreme case of engineering that is software development some sort of axioms around physical law. Our expectations would be way better especially when our bosses require we implement a nosql db that stores rss feeds and use machine learning to sort them in order of "coolness". There's very few actual rules despite opinionations derived from arbitrary paradigms and what should be done to work cohesively as a team. I wish there were a smidge less ivory towers and a smidge more common language.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
digging 3y ago
> The core usefulness of OOP is usability. A language is a matter of connecting thoughts through a mental model. Incidentally, this is exactly how I came to "reinvent" OOP as a newb programmer. I was working in a codebase where I didn't know what tools I had at my disposal, but we had a few modules where I could just type `module.` and see a list of all the methods, right there in front of me (in VSCode's intellisense). I asked, "Why don't we do this for our helper functions?" and we ended up with a handful of major objects to import with easily discoverable methods. now of course I could have crawled the codebase to get the same information, but for someone new to programming and/or someone brand new to the codebase, that isn't necessarily a good use of a time. it can be a lot of slow unraveling of "what goes where", whereas organizing things in "OOP" (I still don't know if I'm actually using this term right because it was just part of how I learned, without being named) teaches that information more quickly through use and experimentation. basically what I was looking for was "namespacing" I guess, but I would also say it helped organize our code in a more useful way.
goatlover 3y ago
But Smalltalk also has inheritance and metaclasses, so it wasn't just objects passing messages. It was also designed as a visual live programming environment which was basically the entire computer system. Kay had his vision, but Smalltalk was implemented as more than just message passing. That and Simula proceeded Smalltalk, which C++ was inspired by, even if Kay coined OOP.

by narag 3y ago

arethuza 3y ago

What about things like CLOS where you have multi-methods and dispatching is done based on the type of all arguments?

mistrial9 3y ago
combine a type system with dispatch logic, using abstractions .. it is very clear for some engineering applications and/or tinkertoys. Many people can get the basic ideas with thirty minutes of introduction.
narag 3y ago
I haven't used it, so not sure if it fits the pattern, but the question for me is: is it useful, time-saving, more usable? does it make the task more clear for the programmer that uses it?
- jghn 3y ago
  It depends. It is a fundamentally different branch of the OOP family tree than what most people are used to seeing. Enough so that I've seen people declare it to *not be OOP*. So if you stumble across the model having only seen the style of OOP popularized by C++ and later Java, no. You will probably *not* find it to be liberating. The idea is that you have classes which model state. And then you have generics that model functionality. And you define methods which provide an implementation of the generic for a class. But it's more flexible than what you see in Java because such a method can be easily added after the fact as it's not intrinsically part of the class' definition. If you're familiar at all with Typeclasses in Haskell & Scala, personally I find those to be similar enough to get the gist. Likewise Dylan and R's S4 objects are modeled after CLOS' structure.
whartung 3y ago
Runtime, multi-method dispatch is probably the singular thing that stands out as "missing" from other systems. I don't miss it a lot, but there have certainly been times when I have. I also enjoyed the ability to not be locked into the rigor of a class structure when it comes to methods. Since CLOS is function based, it's trivial to add functions to a class that you don't even have the source code to. There have been many times working with a 3rd party or system library where I've had that "if only I had this little method" moment that would make my life easier. I'd rather have that capability and fight, say, namespace issues for the "Well what if everyone added their own 'upshiftFirstLetter' method to the String class" problems on an ad hoc basis. Part of this, of course, stems from the locked down nature of the scope of classes. Not having access to internal structures and state. I'd rather take those risks of leveraging internal state knowledge not supported by the original designer vs the alternatives of sometimes having to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jghn 3y ago

> IIRC, Kay's vision is that OOP is about messages. Yes. The actor model is closer to what Kay proposed than the C++/Java style of OOP.

padobson 3y ago

The core usefulness of OOP is usability. This is the reason I find it useful. To me, OOP is as much about your organization as it is about the best way to load, transform, present, edit, and store data. I think the culture of some companies lends itself to various kinds of programming, but it's the cultureless companies where OOP is most useful. The places where nobody is trying to change the world, where people work to pay their mortgages, where an executive may only work for two years and a programmer may only work for six months. It's in an environment like that where a self-documenting, self-configuring code base with custom classes and exceptions that guide the next developer is essential. Every developer should have two users in mind. The person using the software, and the next developer who maintains the software after you're gone. OOP is a great way to empower the second user when the only thing that will reliably outlive the developer is the code base.

Consultant32452 3y ago
I want to second the idea that the primary benefit of OOP is logical organization. For smaller projects I don't care one way or another about OOP practices, but once you start getting into hundreds of thousands of lines of code IMO it becomes an absolute necessity.
- zero_shift 3y ago
  But we don't need classes, vector tables, or other runtime features to achieve organisation. We just need our compiler to recognise namespaces. "module Foo where"
  - Consultant32452 3y ago
    Encapsulation helps the signal to noise ratio. If I create a REST API no one complains they don't have access to the inner-workings, local variables, etc. But if I give a similar experience and call it a "class" suddenly it's ugly and mean.
    - MrJohz 3y ago

thumbuddy 3y ago

Everything is wrong or illfitting. I mean we are making tiny blocks of silicon do extreme amounts of human work, while being entertained with music and videos. OOP is like five abstractions deeper than what it intend to model. It's a tool, I wish people stopped trying to make the extreme case of engineering that is software development some sort of axioms around physical law. Our expectations would be way better especially when our bosses require we implement a nosql db that stores rss feeds and use machine learning to sort them in order of "coolness". There's very few actual rules despite opinionations derived from arbitrary paradigms and what should be done to work cohesively as a team. I wish there were a smidge less ivory towers and a smidge more common language.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

digging 3y ago

> The core usefulness of OOP is usability. A language is a matter of connecting thoughts through a mental model. Incidentally, this is exactly how I came to "reinvent" OOP as a newb programmer. I was working in a codebase where I didn't know what tools I had at my disposal, but we had a few modules where I could just type `module.` and see a list of all the methods, right there in front of me (in VSCode's intellisense). I asked, "Why don't we do this for our helper functions?" and we ended up with a handful of major objects to import with easily discoverable methods. now of course I could have crawled the codebase to get the same information, but for someone new to programming and/or someone brand new to the codebase, that isn't necessarily a good use of a time. it can be a lot of slow unraveling of "what goes where", whereas organizing things in "OOP" (I still don't know if I'm actually using this term right because it was just part of how I learned, without being named) teaches that information more quickly through use and experimentation. basically what I was looking for was "namespacing" I guess, but I would also say it helped organize our code in a more useful way.

goatlover 3y ago

But Smalltalk also has inheritance and metaclasses, so it wasn't just objects passing messages. It was also designed as a visual live programming environment which was basically the entire computer system. Kay had his vision, but Smalltalk was implemented as more than just message passing. That and Simula proceeded Smalltalk, which C++ was inspired by, even if Kay coined OOP.