[erlang-questions] OOP in Erlang

[Tony Arcieri]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 8:49 PM, Richard O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED> wrote:

> I was recently reading a collection of essays by Kent Beck, one of the
> big names in the Smalltalk and Patterns worlds.  Oddly enough, he said
> that he didn't think inheritance was all that big a deal.


I must respectfully disagree here, especially in an everything-is-an-onject
language like Smalltalk.

With everything-is-an-object and inheritance, all of your objects speak a
common object protocol, which can provide all sorts of things to the end
user by default for every object, including powerful introspection methods
which let you peruse and probe a particular object's state at runtime.

Is this possible without inheritance? Sure. But I find it to be particularly
powerful and elegant in languages like Ruby.

-- 
Tony Arcieri
Medioh! A Kudelski Brand