UI, etiquette and OO phobia

[Jonathan Coupe]

----- Original Message -----
From: Jay Nelson <jay@REDACTED>
To: <erlang-questions@REDACTED>
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2003 3:39 AM
Subject: UI, etiquette and OO phobia


>  > I still think that Erlang, in its honourable effort to
>  > subvert OO-mania, is in danger of developing
>  > OO-phobia - but that is a more general subject
>  > than GUI's and I'll try to address it in a future thread.
>
> That definitely is a new topic.  I was a big OO fan
> before OO was commonly practiced.  I have a tendency to
> get bored and move on to new things and to be on
> the fringe rather than in the pack (I like to think the
> leading edge, but fringe dwellers have no global
> context for relative position).  I'm not OO-phobic but
> I am always grasping at new approaches and new
> ways of thinking, and frankly am bored with the status
> quo of UIs and programming in general.  I want to
> rattle some cages and challenge some stagnant thinking.

One of the problems with OO is that, as a single coherent way of
programming, it doesn't really exist. The design, code, development tactics,
and project suitability of  Smalltalk are completely different from CLOS,
and both are completely different from the C++, Java, and Eiffel group. E.g.
one of *the* dominant issues in any project using a statically typed OO
language are always going to be the struggle to design out over-tight
binding. I'd argue that talking of  these languages as a group is more than
usually misleading, even for software engineering, and that a lot of the
early project successes that drove the adoption of OO actually came from
Smalltalk gui programming, while the less successful wave of projects that
followed used statically typed languages in a variety of domains.

Gui is certainly one of the best fits for OO - especially dynamically typed
OO. But Tk manages extremely well with the dynamic typing alone, and gs, as
far as the limited widget library allows, seems even more pleasant to use.

- Jonathan Coupe