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That's not OOP, its the designers and coders. The "problem" with being the mainstream programming paradigm is that the bell curve of talent is fully stocked fr

That's not OOP, its the designers and coders. The "problem" with being the mainstream programming paradigm is that the bell curve of talent is fully stocked from high to low ends. The marketplace of managers looking for: a) cheap labor b) well-understood technology c) ability to fallback to expert knowledge grew up with object-oriented paradigms. Since OOP frameworks removed many low-level coding tasks, the cost of entrance into the labor market allowed the labor pool to be flooded with developers, it helped that demand was so high and investors so hungry that proof-of-concepts often became products. What came out of all this is that OOP matured, but OOA and OOD didn't keep pace as market demanded disciplines. What you see today is many OO systems that were not analyzed or designed by architects who were good analysts and designers, but who understood OOP and had access to a pattern-book. But, taking a page from category theory, we could abstract OO from OOP, OOA and OOD, and should be able to easily see that the same could eventually apply to FP, FA and FD should the bell-curve of talent fill out due to market demand.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
The nice thing about a language like Haskell, then, is that you have to be really smart to use it, reducing the market for low end programmers. Actually, many companies put Haskell (or even Scala) down as a requirement just to filter out the low end programmers, they have no strong intention of actually using those languages. OO is accessible because it is much more naturalistic than FP, being based on natural metaphors (objects) and natural language concepts (subject verb) that make many computer scientists cringe (was it Dijkstra who was against anthropomorphic metaphors?). FP is much more based on math and logic, conveying certain benefits but requiring a change from the way we are normally wired; I've been in a room full of the best of the FP guys before and I could have sworn I was on a different planet. FP is a reliable tool in moderation. But when I'm designing a text editor, object thinking is definitely preferable.
- papsosouid 14y ago
  >The nice thing about a language like Haskell, then, is that you have to be really smart to use it I'm living proof that you are mistaken. >Actually, many companies put Haskell (or even Scala) down as a requirement just to filter out the low end programmers If by "many" you mean "a couple", then it depends what you mean by "low end programmers". Asking for haskell is decent at weeding out people who have no interest in learning new things and improving themselves. It isn't particularly useful for filtering out people who aren't "really smart". >OO is accessible because it is much more naturalistic than FP It is interesting that you pre-suppose that is the case. My experience with teaching people programming with no prior experience is that OOP is not accessible at all, and FP comes quite naturally.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Asking for Haskell is actually good for weeding out most American programmers, but whatever. The point is that you'll get a better programmer if they know lots of programming language paradigms. But I wouldn't for the life of me take on as an employee someone who knows Haskell but not an OOPL (like C#, Java, or at least C++), that would indicate severe ideological bias on their part. I'm using naturalistic here as a real term related to natural language and humanistic fuzzy thinking that we seem to be born with as opposed to the logical mathematical thinking that we must learn at school. The idea that we think (or at least most of us) in terms of objects rather than formulas biases us towards object thinking when designing systems. Its sort of preverse, but I agree with you: its easier to teach FP to people with no programming experience, since you can focus on simple stateless computations. Without objects, you can't even broach the harder topics that teachers carelessly throw into 101 courses. But even if you are using the SICP, you'll see object thinking introduced in Chapter 3. But now we seem to be arguing about languages, of course you can have objects in an FPL and you can have lambdas on an OOPL. The best programmers will be able to apply both of course when applicable, and won't be ideologically biased. The not so great programmers are probably better off with OOP since that's what they'll need for their jobs, though a dose of FP can help them become better programmers.
    - papsosouid 14y ago
      >But I wouldn't for the life of me take on as an employee someone who knows Haskell but not an OOPL (like C#, Java, or at least C++), that would indicate severe ideological bias on their part. Ironically, it actually indicates a severe ideological bias on your part, not theirs. The rest of your post seems like it is entirely platitudes intended to say nothing. No, people don't think in terms of objects, that is why the leaky metaphor used to teach OOP traditionally causes so much confusion, and makes OOP harder to learn than FP. Thinking in terms of FP is not thinking in terms of "formulas", and it appears you are basing all the rest of your assumptions on top of that one faulty assumption. People intuitively understand "I make a thing that transforms other things" much easier than they understand "I make my things know how to transform themselves, or maybe other things, or maybe both, but sometimes neither and I make different things to do the transforming instead, but those things are wrapped inside an "object" that doesn't represent anything for no discernable reason".

seanmcdirmid 14y ago

The nice thing about a language like Haskell, then, is that you have to be really smart to use it, reducing the market for low end programmers. Actually, many companies put Haskell (or even Scala) down as a requirement just to filter out the low end programmers, they have no strong intention of actually using those languages. OO is accessible because it is much more naturalistic than FP, being based on natural metaphors (objects) and natural language concepts (subject verb) that make many computer scientists cringe (was it Dijkstra who was against anthropomorphic metaphors?). FP is much more based on math and logic, conveying certain benefits but requiring a change from the way we are normally wired; I've been in a room full of the best of the FP guys before and I could have sworn I was on a different planet. FP is a reliable tool in moderation. But when I'm designing a text editor, object thinking is definitely preferable.

papsosouid 14y ago
>The nice thing about a language like Haskell, then, is that you have to be really smart to use it I'm living proof that you are mistaken. >Actually, many companies put Haskell (or even Scala) down as a requirement just to filter out the low end programmers If by "many" you mean "a couple", then it depends what you mean by "low end programmers". Asking for haskell is decent at weeding out people who have no interest in learning new things and improving themselves. It isn't particularly useful for filtering out people who aren't "really smart". >OO is accessible because it is much more naturalistic than FP It is interesting that you pre-suppose that is the case. My experience with teaching people programming with no prior experience is that OOP is not accessible at all, and FP comes quite naturally.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  Asking for Haskell is actually good for weeding out most American programmers, but whatever. The point is that you'll get a better programmer if they know lots of programming language paradigms. But I wouldn't for the life of me take on as an employee someone who knows Haskell but not an OOPL (like C#, Java, or at least C++), that would indicate severe ideological bias on their part. I'm using naturalistic here as a real term related to natural language and humanistic fuzzy thinking that we seem to be born with as opposed to the logical mathematical thinking that we must learn at school. The idea that we think (or at least most of us) in terms of objects rather than formulas biases us towards object thinking when designing systems. Its sort of preverse, but I agree with you: its easier to teach FP to people with no programming experience, since you can focus on simple stateless computations. Without objects, you can't even broach the harder topics that teachers carelessly throw into 101 courses. But even if you are using the SICP, you'll see object thinking introduced in Chapter 3. But now we seem to be arguing about languages, of course you can have objects in an FPL and you can have lambdas on an OOPL. The best programmers will be able to apply both of course when applicable, and won't be ideologically biased. The not so great programmers are probably better off with OOP since that's what they'll need for their jobs, though a dose of FP can help them become better programmers.
  - papsosouid 14y ago
    >But I wouldn't for the life of me take on as an employee someone who knows Haskell but not an OOPL (like C#, Java, or at least C++), that would indicate severe ideological bias on their part. Ironically, it actually indicates a severe ideological bias on your part, not theirs. The rest of your post seems like it is entirely platitudes intended to say nothing. No, people don't think in terms of objects, that is why the leaky metaphor used to teach OOP traditionally causes so much confusion, and makes OOP harder to learn than FP. Thinking in terms of FP is not thinking in terms of "formulas", and it appears you are basing all the rest of your assumptions on top of that one faulty assumption. People intuitively understand "I make a thing that transforms other things" much easier than they understand "I make my things know how to transform themselves, or maybe other things, or maybe both, but sometimes neither and I make different things to do the transforming instead, but those things are wrapped inside an "object" that doesn't represent anything for no discernable reason".