On Mar 28, 8:32 am, Jonah Thomas <jethom...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> One of the early promises of OO was that great designers could set up OO
> systems that mediocre coders could then use, and the coders would find
> things arranged so simply that they wouldn't make mistakes. This promise
> has failed, probably inevitably. Instead we sometimes get mediocre
> designers making OO systems that get in the way for good programmers who
> come after them. Of course this is not exactly a flaw in OO, it's a
> misuse of OO. But the marketing promise that OO would be hard to misuse
> has failed.
And then you change the article from "a" or "one" OO marketing claim
to "the" OO marketing claim.
> I don't fully agree with my own OO-ba****ng. I think the time has come
> that a new marketing gimmick can replace the OO marketing gimmick, and I
> wonder what it will be like, and I fall into that sort of language when
> I think in those terms. OO methodology is OK, most of us use it when
> it's clearly useful. OO formal methods are OK, they can be useful in
> specific cir***stances. OO marketing has run its course.
The marketing claim that good OO programmers can design an object
system that allows other good OO programmers to produce solutions more
efficiently ... I don't see anything that contradicts that claim.
*Every* "next big thing" programming technique goes through a silver
bullet phase where warranted claims are expanded on by enthusiastic
marketing into unwarranted claims.
And further, OO programming techniques *can*, for problems that can be
stated as simple problems in building artificial objects, be used to
make things "foolproof" in the sense of "if it runs, it works
correctly, if you what you said you wanted is what you want".
However, intrinsic to that is that it can't be the general purpose OO
system that an expert uses to build that kind of "OO for dummies"
system. The expert designer needs to work on a canvass without those
guardrails in place in order to design the guardrails correctly for
that particular problem.
That's nothing intrinsic to OOP, its intrinsic to the "XYZ for
dummies" problem. They work by not allowing the user to do something
that might be dangerous. They must by the nature of the design
challenge err on the side of caution.
So the offending marketing claim is not a *contradiction* of reality,
its a *gross simplification* of reality. And it would be entirely
unsurprising if attacking it as saying something that is the opposite
of truth, instead of something that is a gross oversimplification of
truth, the answer is someone who is familiar with the truth to see the
truth in place of the gross oversimplification, and respond to the
attack on the simplification as an attack on the original truth, and
off things head into another pointless argument where the two sides
are using the same words to mean different things.
This is all, of course, from the perspective of my conclusion from the
old sandbox Forth discussion, which was that it could be done, but
normally there's no point ... but Forth would be a handy toolkit for
building a language designed to live in a sandbox.
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