Maybe Erlang is OO after all?

[Kurt at DBC]

Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Kurt at DBC wrote:
> 
> I think this is more a problem of the way that OO is typically implemented.

and

> It's also a problem of the way that OO classes are typically written. 

Which I whole-heartedly agree with.
But I'd also suggest that how a paradigm is typically implemented and
how it is typically used provide the most useful description of that
paradigm.

> With that design, again there's a lot of state involved. If a language 
> makes it easy to package out-of-band data such as error diagnostics into 
> results, and where it's likewise easy to disassemble that data on the 
> caller side, then it's not necessary to have this. 

Unsure of 'out-of-band', but the (typically implemented) OO method
of communication via procedure call is what I was driving at:
the sequence of communicating is explicit (discrete) as opposed to
Erlangs 'handle any message at any time' approach (continuous).

> I think these difference contribute more to the difficulties in OO 
> design than any difference between time modelling. Actually, I don't 

I don't know how much Java has changed over the last few years (and am
very conscious that there are some knowledgeable Java people on the
list), but not that long ago one of the most widely promoted
communication methods was to declare a local proxy object and implement
comms as if they were local procedure calls. Presumably, when that
worked, it would work very well, but when it didn't you'd be in a world
of hurt.
Regardless, at the time it was widely held as the OO way of doing
communication. But once you're doing that, you are explicitly managing
the sequence of communication, and it seems to me that this lower
level of managing the sequence *is* the difficulty when compared to
my idealised view of Erlangs approach of check what messages, if any,
have arrived and handle them.

I don't know that I've done a much better job of explaining myself this
time ;) - I feel like I'm trying to describe what a grey blanket in the
fog would look like if it wasn't there *

Also Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> (It's good to see other people in NZ interested
> in Erlang, though.)

And it is ;)
Perhaps one of us could host the NZ Erlounge, we wouldn't even
need a lounge, we could have the ErlDoorway, or the ErlBroomCupboard.


* describing black cats that aren't in dark rooms is *way* beyond me.

Cheers, Kurt.