Eppur si sugat

[Peter-Henry Mander]

Chris Pressey wrote:
> On Wed, 28 May 2003 07:46:41 +0100
> Peter-Henry Mander <erlang@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
>>As for the debate, it looks as if you are all fighting over how to 
>>formalise the OO "method." Joe, from the FP camp desires to see the 
>>formal definition of OO to enable comparison with the formal
>>definition of any FP language. Such definition _does_not_exist_ for
>>OO, because it has grown out of day-to-day experience and "best
>>practices" of programmers in the trenches who don't necessarily have
>>time or the inclination to write a thesis about how they get results.
> 
> Really?  The "Object have not failed" remarks from Garry's link seem to
> imply that it has been formalized at least once.
> 

Yeah, and imho he misses the point (or perverts it!) about "smart data 
and dumb code" by thinking "smart data" == "objects"! What is _really_ 
meant is "smart data structure design" and "functions without state i.e. 
dumb", as we find in FP.

The interesting thing is that Erlang has the power to create concurrent 
communicating "objects" with _real_ message passing, not the "messages" 
which are no more than function calls in modern OO languages. In effect 
Erlang can be an OO language (sorry Joe), it's just not imposed upon the 
programmer. It also has the prototyping capability of Smalltalk if you 
exploit dynamic code replacement. It has the best building blocks a 
language can have for a helluva lot of tasks.

I think the lack of imposition of a half-baked, inconsistent 
interpretation of the vague OO concepts (or any other "concept") has 
given Erlang a huge advantage; it can adapt to the latest trend with 
little effort, even the inconsistent ones!

There you are Joe, Erlang is the best foundation to implement any of the 
latest programming trends (-:

Pete.