5 ms·

Love it when people write about OO without OO experience.

by Uchikoma 14y ago

willvarfar 14y ago
Are you saying Joe Armstrong doesn't know what he's talking about? He's a very googleable guy.
- Uchikoma 14y ago
  I'm not aware of Joe Armstrong having extensive OO experience - either as a programmer or a language designer. Could you fill me in? Perhaps the picture I have is completely wrong. Erlang is from 1986. Did he gather extensive OO experience before? In Smalltalk? Or on the side while developing Erlang?
  - crntaylor 14y ago
    According to a message he posted[0] on the erlang-questions mailing list, since 1967 he has written in Fortran, Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk, Erlang, C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Lua, Javascript, Haskell, ML and OCaml. I italicised all the object-oriented ones. Saying that Joe Armstrong doesn't have "extensive OO experience" is pretty comical! [0] http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/071949.html http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/07...
    - Uchikoma 14y ago
      Extensive experience? About Java: "I tried Java" About C++: "I saw C++ coming and read the book - or at least tried to read the book - there's a dent in the wall behind my piano, where the book hit the wall" About Smalltalk: "I learnt (with various degrees of proficiency) [...] smalltalk [...] and became proficient in Prolog (aggghhh - the beauty ....)" About the others: " I also (later) tried Python (ok), Ruby (ok)". We might vary in our perception, but I would not call this extensive experience, "trying" some languages and "trying" to read a book. I would call "I've written some systems in Java for 10 years" extensive Java experience.
      - loxs 14y ago
        So you are saying that you are a better language expert, and know better than him?
        coldtea 14y ago
        Why can't he say that? Several people in HN should know more about OO than Armstrong. There are academics that have taught and worked for decades on OO systems and concepts among the crowd, unlike Joe. In general, popular language creators are hardly the more knowledgable of the various PL concepts and issues. Simon Peyton Jones probably knows hundred times more about such stuff than Matz or Guido do, for example.
        dbecker 14y ago
        It's worth pointing out that the original comment claimed Armstrong had no OO experience... not simply that Armstrong wasn't the most knowledgable OO programmer on HN.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - beagle3 14y ago
        He's humble. If you read what he wrote (not just this quote), it is clear that he has a better grasp of OO than most OO practitioners and language designers. And especially since OO is not well defined (see pg's quote of Jon Rees' characterization), most OO people can, and often do, claim everyone who uses a different OO definition than they do has no experience.
      - aidos 14y ago
        The quote posted in the initial comment really has no relevance to Armin's article so it's fair enough to call it out in this context. To attack the quote itself by simply assuming the author is inexperienced in OO just silly. Particularly so, given that Joe Armstrong has a grasp of computer languages that most of us could only ever dream of.
    - tikhonj 14y ago
      OCaml, as the name ("Objective Caml") implies, also supports object-oriented programming. It actually has a pretty clever implementation of it as well. That said, many people tend to stick to the functional bits of OCaml and don't venture out into the OOP bits very often.
      - crntaylor 14y ago
        I thought about italicising OCaml as well, but I'd hesitate to call it an object-oriented language. It's more like a functional language that happens to have an object system. Likewise Common Lisp has an object system (CLOS) but I wouldn't call it an object-oriented language.
  - Mutjake 14y ago
    From http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop " Is Erlang object oriented? Joe Armstrong: Smalltalk got a lot of the things right. So if your question is about what I think about object oriented programming, I sort of changed my mind over that. I wrote a an article, a blog thing, years ago - Why object oriented programming is silly. I mainly wanted to provoke people with it. They had a quite interesting response to that and I managed to annoy a lot of people, which was part of the intention actually. I started wondering about what object oriented programming was and I thought Erlang wasn't object oriented, it was a functional programming language. Then, my thesis supervisor said "But you're wrong, Erlang is extremely object oriented". He said object oriented languages aren't object oriented. I might think, though I'm not quite sure if I believe this or not, but Erlang might be the only object oriented language because the 3 tenets of object oriented programming are that it's based on message passing, that you have isolation between objects and have polymorphism. Alan Kay himself wrote this famous thing and said "The notion of object oriented programming is completely misunderstood. It's not about objects and classes, it's all about messages". He wrote that and he said that the initial reaction to object oriented programming was to overemphasize the classes and methods and under emphasize the messages and if we talk much more about messages then it would be a lot nicer. The original Smalltalk was always talking about objects and you sent messages to them and they responded by sending messages back. But you don't really do that and you don't really have isolation which is one of the problems. Dan Ingalls said yesterday (I thought it was very nice) about messaging that once you got messaging, you don't have to care where the message came from. You don't really have to care, the runtime system has to organize the delivery of the message, we don't have to care about how it's processed. It sort of decouples the sender and the receiver in this kind of mutual way. That's why I love messaging. The 3 things that object oriented programming has it's messaging, which is possibly the most important thing. The next thing is isolation and that's what I talked about earlier, that my program shouldn't crash your program, if the 2 things are isolated, then any mistakes I make in my program will not crash your program. This is certainly not true with Java. You cannot take 2 Java applications, bung them in the JVM and one of them still halts the machine and the other one will halt as well. You can crash somebody else's application, so they are not isolated. The third thing you want is polymorphism. Polymorphism is especially regarding messaging, that's just there for the programmer's convenience. It's very nice to have for all objects or all processes or whatever you call them, to have a printMe method - "Go print yourself" and then they print themselves. That's because the programmers, if they all got different names, the programmer is never going to remember this, so it's a polymorphism. It just means "OK, all objects have a printMe method. All objects have a what's your size method or introspection method." Erlang has got all these things. It's got isolation, it's got polymorphism and it's got pure messaging. From that point of view, we might say it's the only object oriented language and perhaps I was a bit premature in saying that object oriented languages are about. You can try it and see it for yourself." It depends a lot on how one defines OO, but in this regard he has -- or at least he has given some thought for it.
- ankitml 14y ago
  being googleable and knowing what he is talking about doesnt mean that his this quote is relavant in this context. What he said is a good piece of advice, but only when looked through larger window of programming. When we are talking about only python and choices of coding style in python, his quote looks like santa on valentines day!
  - dbecker 14y ago
    That's fine. Armstrong may be wrong in this case, but he doesn't deserve the ad hominem attack.
    - ankitml 14y ago
      Ya he doesnt. I think the person who brought him into discussion out of context deserves this. As I said being a santa is not bad, but someone who brought santa on valentines day is wrong
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  Joe Armstrong is very opinionated. I would want to hear what he has to say but I wouldn't take him as an unbiased authority.
revscat 14y ago
Lets stick to the argument made rather than the person making it.

Love it when people write about OO without OO experience.

willvarfar 14y ago

Are you saying Joe Armstrong doesn't know what he's talking about? He's a very googleable guy.

Uchikoma 14y ago
I'm not aware of Joe Armstrong having extensive OO experience - either as a programmer or a language designer. Could you fill me in? Perhaps the picture I have is completely wrong. Erlang is from 1986. Did he gather extensive OO experience before? In Smalltalk? Or on the side while developing Erlang?
- crntaylor 14y ago
  According to a message he posted[0] on the erlang-questions mailing list, since 1967 he has written in Fortran, Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk, Erlang, C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Lua, Javascript, Haskell, ML and OCaml. I italicised all the object-oriented ones. Saying that Joe Armstrong doesn't have "extensive OO experience" is pretty comical! [0] http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/071949.html http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/07...
  - Uchikoma 14y ago
    Extensive experience? About Java: "I tried Java" About C++: "I saw C++ coming and read the book - or at least tried to read the book - there's a dent in the wall behind my piano, where the book hit the wall" About Smalltalk: "I learnt (with various degrees of proficiency) [...] smalltalk [...] and became proficient in Prolog (aggghhh - the beauty ....)" About the others: " I also (later) tried Python (ok), Ruby (ok)". We might vary in our perception, but I would not call this extensive experience, "trying" some languages and "trying" to read a book. I would call "I've written some systems in Java for 10 years" extensive Java experience.
    - loxs 14y ago
      So you are saying that you are a better language expert, and know better than him?
      - coldtea 14y ago
        Why can't he say that? Several people in HN should know more about OO than Armstrong. There are academics that have taught and worked for decades on OO systems and concepts among the crowd, unlike Joe. In general, popular language creators are hardly the more knowledgable of the various PL concepts and issues. Simon Peyton Jones probably knows hundred times more about such stuff than Matz or Guido do, for example.
        dbecker 14y ago
        It's worth pointing out that the original comment claimed Armstrong had no OO experience... not simply that Armstrong wasn't the most knowledgable OO programmer on HN.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - beagle3 14y ago
      He's humble. If you read what he wrote (not just this quote), it is clear that he has a better grasp of OO than most OO practitioners and language designers. And especially since OO is not well defined (see pg's quote of Jon Rees' characterization), most OO people can, and often do, claim everyone who uses a different OO definition than they do has no experience.
    - aidos 14y ago
      The quote posted in the initial comment really has no relevance to Armin's article so it's fair enough to call it out in this context. To attack the quote itself by simply assuming the author is inexperienced in OO just silly. Particularly so, given that Joe Armstrong has a grasp of computer languages that most of us could only ever dream of.
  - tikhonj 14y ago
    OCaml, as the name ("Objective Caml") implies, also supports object-oriented programming. It actually has a pretty clever implementation of it as well. That said, many people tend to stick to the functional bits of OCaml and don't venture out into the OOP bits very often.
    - crntaylor 14y ago
      I thought about italicising OCaml as well, but I'd hesitate to call it an object-oriented language. It's more like a functional language that happens to have an object system. Likewise Common Lisp has an object system (CLOS) but I wouldn't call it an object-oriented language.
- Mutjake 14y ago
  From http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop " Is Erlang object oriented? Joe Armstrong: Smalltalk got a lot of the things right. So if your question is about what I think about object oriented programming, I sort of changed my mind over that. I wrote a an article, a blog thing, years ago - Why object oriented programming is silly. I mainly wanted to provoke people with it. They had a quite interesting response to that and I managed to annoy a lot of people, which was part of the intention actually. I started wondering about what object oriented programming was and I thought Erlang wasn't object oriented, it was a functional programming language. Then, my thesis supervisor said "But you're wrong, Erlang is extremely object oriented". He said object oriented languages aren't object oriented. I might think, though I'm not quite sure if I believe this or not, but Erlang might be the only object oriented language because the 3 tenets of object oriented programming are that it's based on message passing, that you have isolation between objects and have polymorphism. Alan Kay himself wrote this famous thing and said "The notion of object oriented programming is completely misunderstood. It's not about objects and classes, it's all about messages". He wrote that and he said that the initial reaction to object oriented programming was to overemphasize the classes and methods and under emphasize the messages and if we talk much more about messages then it would be a lot nicer. The original Smalltalk was always talking about objects and you sent messages to them and they responded by sending messages back. But you don't really do that and you don't really have isolation which is one of the problems. Dan Ingalls said yesterday (I thought it was very nice) about messaging that once you got messaging, you don't have to care where the message came from. You don't really have to care, the runtime system has to organize the delivery of the message, we don't have to care about how it's processed. It sort of decouples the sender and the receiver in this kind of mutual way. That's why I love messaging. The 3 things that object oriented programming has it's messaging, which is possibly the most important thing. The next thing is isolation and that's what I talked about earlier, that my program shouldn't crash your program, if the 2 things are isolated, then any mistakes I make in my program will not crash your program. This is certainly not true with Java. You cannot take 2 Java applications, bung them in the JVM and one of them still halts the machine and the other one will halt as well. You can crash somebody else's application, so they are not isolated. The third thing you want is polymorphism. Polymorphism is especially regarding messaging, that's just there for the programmer's convenience. It's very nice to have for all objects or all processes or whatever you call them, to have a printMe method - "Go print yourself" and then they print themselves. That's because the programmers, if they all got different names, the programmer is never going to remember this, so it's a polymorphism. It just means "OK, all objects have a printMe method. All objects have a what's your size method or introspection method." Erlang has got all these things. It's got isolation, it's got polymorphism and it's got pure messaging. From that point of view, we might say it's the only object oriented language and perhaps I was a bit premature in saying that object oriented languages are about. You can try it and see it for yourself." It depends a lot on how one defines OO, but in this regard he has -- or at least he has given some thought for it.
ankitml 14y ago
being googleable and knowing what he is talking about doesnt mean that his this quote is relavant in this context. What he said is a good piece of advice, but only when looked through larger window of programming. When we are talking about only python and choices of coding style in python, his quote looks like santa on valentines day!
- dbecker 14y ago
  That's fine. Armstrong may be wrong in this case, but he doesn't deserve the ad hominem attack.
  - ankitml 14y ago
    Ya he doesnt. I think the person who brought him into discussion out of context deserves this. As I said being a santa is not bad, but someone who brought santa on valentines day is wrong
seanmcdirmid 14y ago
Joe Armstrong is very opinionated. I would want to hear what he has to say but I wouldn't take him as an unbiased authority.

revscat 14y ago

Lets stick to the argument made rather than the person making it.