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32 years ago I had just finished my "erikoistyö" (a pregrad exercise) in CS at the Helsinki Uni about combining object-oriented programming with relational data

32 years ago I had just finished my "erikoistyö" (a pregrad exercise) in CS at the Helsinki Uni about combining object-oriented programming with relational databases and uploaded it to nic.funet.fi for all to see and enjoy - I was that proud of it. Even promised to send a 1.4MB diskette for those who couldn't download it for whatever reason. Cannot help feeling good of seeing it's still there. https://www.funet.fi/pub/sci/computer/oop/ https://www.funet.fi/pub/sci/computer/oop/ Only curiosity value is left probably, but back then it felt like magic to be able to publish something like this on my own. Half a dozen people even asked for the diskette, which I sent to them.

scrame 3y ago
Huh. That's pretty cool. So did you write the first ORM?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- juhanima 3y ago
  Wouldn't claim so - perhaps the ideas were floating in the air. What I know for sure is that my work wasn't used for much. What's more alarming is that it seems those 32 years old files at ftp.funet.fi are mostly unreadable by now. Back then I thought PostScript would last but alas! that is not the case. Ghostcript can show just about the cover page and that's all. Libreoffice does a little bit better with the DOC-file but it's still not quite right. So if there is anything to learn it's about persistent document formats. I wish I had known about LaTeX back then.
  - juhanima 3y ago
    Actually PostScript did last, I was just too stupid to realize that one needs to press <enter> for every new page in gv. Anyway: here is the pdf made by ps2pdf: https://juhani.xn--mkel-load.net/public/oodbif.pdf https://juhani.xn--mkel-load.net/public/oodbif.pdf
    - GEBBL 3y ago
      Quite modern thinking when you write ‘for an intelligent human user… what she wants to do’. Normally ‘he’ would be used, or maybe at that time. Just something interesting I saw. Very interesting to see the files are still there!
      - romland 3y ago
        It might be a Nordic thing? I'm from about the same era (but Sweden) and when writing documents like that, I'd also always use 'she'.
        defrost 3y ago
        I'd say that assuming 'he' might be a US thing - 42 years ago when I was in Australian university math | comp sci classes a third of the students were female as were staff. Even then I routinely used 'they' when writing about people in general, authors I had not met, etc. as there was a good chance they weren't male.
        runlevel1 3y ago
        It used to be taught that the singular "they" was ungrammatical. (Ironically, the singular usage predates the plural.) The rule faded in other parts of the Anglosphere a bit earlier than in the US. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
        defrost 3y ago
        Heh. Wikipedia reinforces my understanding .. it's been in common use for centuries and only relatively recently have a few dipshits declared it to be "wrong" Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error. Who d'fuck gives a toss about prescriptive gammons tellin udders de write ways to use da Engrish, 'hey? FWiW the Oxford English Dictionary is descriptive and not prescriptive. All Hail the OED.
WJW 3y ago
> Object-oriented programming techniques are slowly becoming more and more widely accepted That is so wild to read in a time when OOP has more or less conquered the programming industry. :)
- juhanima 3y ago
  To only give up that position to functional programming?
  - fasterik 3y ago
    OOP was a mistake. Functional programming has some interesting ideas, but it's not useful in practical applications. Procedural programming is the simplest and fastest way to make the computer do things.
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      OOP is orthogonal to FP vs procedural. You can use or not use OOP in both. Also, OOP is fine. Class oriented programming (often called OOP by accident) is the real flawed paradigm.
    - msla 3y ago
      OOP is how large-scale procedural programs are organized. It allows programmers to try to reason about medium-scale parts of the system. (Mesoscale programming? Is that a thing yet?) FP is a set of guarantees (maybe even enforced by the compiler) about program behavior which enable optimizations, for the compiler, and reasoning about small parts of the system in isolation, for the programmers. Enough FP can allow you to abstract away the procedural parts, but even a little FP in a procedural codebase can be a good thing. Ditto a little OO, which is why C programmers reinvent bits and pieces of Smalltalk every so often.
    - amno 3y ago
      OOP itself is not a misstake, but the way it is (usually) implemented probably is.
    - 3y ago
xattt 3y ago
It’s interesting to note the timestamps. I’m guessing this might trigger memories of uploading them in a particular order.
swozey 3y ago
I was 6-7 at this point in time but I went from DOS to Win 3.1. I don't remember ever hearing about Win 3.0 and a quick google search makes it look like Win 3.0 and 3.1 were drastically different for some reason that I'm not really tracking down. I wonder why my dad held off until 3.1. This was a fun watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuMeqcuTjSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuMeqcuTjSY
- swozey 3y ago
  Downvoted for literally being curious to a Win API developer as to why 3.0 and 3.1 were so drastically different. I have a feeling the people who downvoted me didn't even go through this code base and realize how specific to Win 3.0 it was. Good on ya, mates. Keep reading only headlines.
aleku 3y ago
Was this "M{kel{_Juhani_NOK@smail.elisa.fi" an effort to mask your address from scrappers? I cannot imagine there were many scrappers back then.
- Boltgolt 3y ago
  Looks like an decoding error for the Finnish special characters
- jks 3y ago
  Because 7-bit ASCII didn't include accented characters used in many European langauges, there were national changes. The Finnish variant replaced {|}[\] with äöåÄÖÅ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Replacement_Character_Set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Replacement_Character...
  - pavlov 3y ago
    One might guess the people who decided on this replacement were not Unix programmers... The lack of brackets, caret, tilde and other ASCII special characters on various localized keyboards was a real problem in the 1980s. The C language standard solved it by introducing trigraphs: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming/C_trigraph https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming/C_trigraph You can still write valid C using ??< instead of {, and so on. This feature will be removed from the C standard in a couple of years though.
    - jks 3y ago
      Of course you could still use {} etc, they just might show up as localized characters in your source code. There was no character set conversion involved at the source code level, your terminal font just might have had the glyph for ä in the place of {. The people who designed the Finnish keyboard layout were definitely not programmers, though: https://kbdlayout.info/KBDFI/ https://kbdlayout.info/KBDFI/
      - anthk 3y ago

scrame 3y ago

Huh. That's pretty cool. So did you write the first ORM?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
juhanima 3y ago
Wouldn't claim so - perhaps the ideas were floating in the air. What I know for sure is that my work wasn't used for much. What's more alarming is that it seems those 32 years old files at ftp.funet.fi are mostly unreadable by now. Back then I thought PostScript would last but alas! that is not the case. Ghostcript can show just about the cover page and that's all. Libreoffice does a little bit better with the DOC-file but it's still not quite right. So if there is anything to learn it's about persistent document formats. I wish I had known about LaTeX back then.
- juhanima 3y ago
  Actually PostScript did last, I was just too stupid to realize that one needs to press <enter> for every new page in gv. Anyway: here is the pdf made by ps2pdf: https://juhani.xn--mkel-load.net/public/oodbif.pdf https://juhani.xn--mkel-load.net/public/oodbif.pdf
  - GEBBL 3y ago
    Quite modern thinking when you write ‘for an intelligent human user… what she wants to do’. Normally ‘he’ would be used, or maybe at that time. Just something interesting I saw. Very interesting to see the files are still there!
    - romland 3y ago
      It might be a Nordic thing? I'm from about the same era (but Sweden) and when writing documents like that, I'd also always use 'she'.
      - defrost 3y ago
        I'd say that assuming 'he' might be a US thing - 42 years ago when I was in Australian university math | comp sci classes a third of the students were female as were staff. Even then I routinely used 'they' when writing about people in general, authors I had not met, etc. as there was a good chance they weren't male.
        runlevel1 3y ago
        It used to be taught that the singular "they" was ungrammatical. (Ironically, the singular usage predates the plural.) The rule faded in other parts of the Anglosphere a bit earlier than in the US. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
        defrost 3y ago
        Heh. Wikipedia reinforces my understanding .. it's been in common use for centuries and only relatively recently have a few dipshits declared it to be "wrong" Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error. Who d'fuck gives a toss about prescriptive gammons tellin udders de write ways to use da Engrish, 'hey? FWiW the Oxford English Dictionary is descriptive and not prescriptive. All Hail the OED.

WJW 3y ago

> Object-oriented programming techniques are slowly becoming more and more widely accepted That is so wild to read in a time when OOP has more or less conquered the programming industry. :)

juhanima 3y ago
To only give up that position to functional programming?
- fasterik 3y ago
  OOP was a mistake. Functional programming has some interesting ideas, but it's not useful in practical applications. Procedural programming is the simplest and fastest way to make the computer do things.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    OOP is orthogonal to FP vs procedural. You can use or not use OOP in both. Also, OOP is fine. Class oriented programming (often called OOP by accident) is the real flawed paradigm.
  - msla 3y ago
    OOP is how large-scale procedural programs are organized. It allows programmers to try to reason about medium-scale parts of the system. (Mesoscale programming? Is that a thing yet?) FP is a set of guarantees (maybe even enforced by the compiler) about program behavior which enable optimizations, for the compiler, and reasoning about small parts of the system in isolation, for the programmers. Enough FP can allow you to abstract away the procedural parts, but even a little FP in a procedural codebase can be a good thing. Ditto a little OO, which is why C programmers reinvent bits and pieces of Smalltalk every so often.
  - amno 3y ago
    OOP itself is not a misstake, but the way it is (usually) implemented probably is.
  - 3y ago

xattt 3y ago

It’s interesting to note the timestamps. I’m guessing this might trigger memories of uploading them in a particular order.

swozey 3y ago

I was 6-7 at this point in time but I went from DOS to Win 3.1. I don't remember ever hearing about Win 3.0 and a quick google search makes it look like Win 3.0 and 3.1 were drastically different for some reason that I'm not really tracking down. I wonder why my dad held off until 3.1. This was a fun watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuMeqcuTjSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuMeqcuTjSY

swozey 3y ago
Downvoted for literally being curious to a Win API developer as to why 3.0 and 3.1 were so drastically different. I have a feeling the people who downvoted me didn't even go through this code base and realize how specific to Win 3.0 it was. Good on ya, mates. Keep reading only headlines.

aleku 3y ago

Was this "M{kel{_Juhani_NOK@smail.elisa.fi" an effort to mask your address from scrappers? I cannot imagine there were many scrappers back then.

Boltgolt 3y ago
Looks like an decoding error for the Finnish special characters
jks 3y ago
Because 7-bit ASCII didn't include accented characters used in many European langauges, there were national changes. The Finnish variant replaced {|}[\] with äöåÄÖÅ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Replacement_Character_Set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Replacement_Character...
- pavlov 3y ago
  One might guess the people who decided on this replacement were not Unix programmers... The lack of brackets, caret, tilde and other ASCII special characters on various localized keyboards was a real problem in the 1980s. The C language standard solved it by introducing trigraphs: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming/C_trigraph https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming/C_trigraph You can still write valid C using ??< instead of {, and so on. This feature will be removed from the C standard in a couple of years though.
  - jks 3y ago
    Of course you could still use {} etc, they just might show up as localized characters in your source code. There was no character set conversion involved at the source code level, your terminal font just might have had the glyph for ä in the place of {. The people who designed the Finnish keyboard layout were definitely not programmers, though: https://kbdlayout.info/KBDFI/ https://kbdlayout.info/KBDFI/
    - anthk 3y ago