[erlang-questions] Re: OOP in Erlang

[Dave Smith]

It wasn't my intention to try to define OO.  Those of us who work in
industry feel we know what a peer is talking about when he uses the term
(irrespective of what was in Allan Kay's head when he coined the term 40
years ago).




--DS


On 14 August 2010 02:58, Michael Turner <michael.eugene.turner@REDACTED>wrote:

> "The inheritance concept, on the other hand is crucial to OO design; not
> so much for the  inherited functionality as for type polymorphism.
>  Other languages provide this using algebraic data types and other
> distinguished unions, but in OO we work with classes, and we need
> polymorphic types to avoid the deluge of conditionals that we would see
> otherwise."
>
> With all due respect, when I boiled this paragraph down to its essentials,
> it read to me like this: "The definition of 'object-oriented design' entails
> inheritance, because that's the way 'object-oriented' was defined."
>
> There's a particularly strenuous force-fitting of this definition in one of
> the comments on that Alan Kay interview -- it's first admitted that Alan Kay
> coined the term and contributed a lot of ideas, but then flatly asserted
> that object-orientation was defined by the architects of Simula -- even
> though Simula 67 lacked encapsulation (no class variables, even -- you had
> to use globals) and even though Simula 67's treatments of types and
> inheritance probably doesn't meet some people's definitions of polymorphism.
>
> There's a Humpty Dumpty feeling about a lot of these debates.  ISTR a
> similar one, almost two decades ago, about whether C++ was truly
> "polymorphic" despite being strongly typed.  It turned out that
> "polymorphic" had come to mean different things to different people, that
> there was no hard-and-fast formal definition.  Whether you were going to
> "win" such arguments often depended on your staying power in debate.
>
> I think the Erlang community would do itself a world of good by finding
> somebody to go knock on Alan Kay's door in Glendale and spend 15 minutes
> with him showing how Erlang does things.  As far as I can tell, he's never
> said anything about the language.  (Perhaps because he's hardly heard of it.
>  After all, if there's one thing the Erlang community seems dismayingly bad
> at, it's self-promotion.)  If Alan Kay said, "Erlang looks like almost what
> I've been talking about since the mid-60s, I wonder how I missed it for so
> many years?" I think some of you might be surprised by how many highly
> influential people in the programming world would sit up and take notice.
>
> -michael turner
>
> 2010/8/14 Dave Smith <dave.smith.to@REDACTED>
>
> Yes I agree,  The lack of isolation is where the the big names of OOP went
>> wrong; the likes of C++, Java, C# and JavaScript provide ways for state to
>> 'leak out' of objects by means of pointers and references.  What good is
>> encapsulation if member variables are bound to shared objects.  One can
>> avoid this problem  if he goes our of his way, but in practice, this is
>> rarely done.  Strict encapsulation should be the rule, not an options.
>> Arguing that encapsulation is a virtue with respect to these languages
>> seems
>> very shallow indeed.
>>
>>  Respectfully, I would not go as far as Joe to say that OO is a poor
>> paradigm for modelling real world applications, as I've heard him argue in
>> the past.  I've made a career out of object modelling and writing software
>> in  C++ and Java -- it's very much the way I approach software design.
>>
>> The inheritance concept, on the other hand is crucial to OO design; not so
>> much for the  inherited functionality as for type polymorphism.  Other
>> languages provide this using algebraic data types and other distinguished
>> unions, but in OO we work with classes, and we need polymorphic types to
>> avoid the deluge of conditionals that we would see otherwise.
>>
>> --DS
>>
>>
>> 2010/8/13 Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED>
>>
>> > ery much an OOPL - since deep down, very
>> > deep down, it tries to make makes a passable job of getting message
>> > passing and isolation right.  In this sense it is far more OO than
>> > languages like Java (etc.) that have no notion of isolation and thus
>> > cannot be considered OO
>> >
>>
>
>