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0 pointsjghn5y ago0 comments

I agree w/ your sentiments here, but it is worth keeping in mind that Simula predates Smalltalk and could be viewed as both the first OO language and the progenitor of what became mainstream OOP.

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klibertp5y ago· 2 in thread

You're right. I'm constantly surprised how much of the history of programming I'm still missing, despite trying to learn as much as I can about it. The feature set of Algol blew my mind when I first learned about it, for example - and now I see I need to take a closer look at Simula, which was developed as a superset/extension of Algol. Learning about that is fascinating and really puts the "language wars" of today into perspective.

jghnOP5y ago

BTW I saw you mention class oriented vs object oriented elsewhere and I do think that captures the difference pretty well, thus why I agreed with your sentiments. The actor model basically is object oriented programming in that context, whereas what most people mean winds up being class oriented.

There's (at least) a third model IMO from CLOS & friends, such as Dylan, S4, and I'd argue Haskell Typeclasses. Not sure what I'd call it but it's the idea where you define data classes, generic functions, and then provide linkages between those data classes and the generic functions to give you methods on the state

klibertp5y ago

Yes, generic functions and multimethods are one solution to the expression problem, and they're pretty different from Smalltalk-like OOP. It's a shame they aren't more widely adopted - I think only Julia, Nim, and Clojure have them as a feature.

Actually, if not for some historical accidents, we could have Dylan in place of Java today... I sometimes dream about such a world: functional core, CLOS-like generic functions and multimethods, sane multiple inheritance, syntax-case-like macros, native AOT compiler, sane module system... OpenDylan - the implementation I played with - is slow as molasses, but with even a tiny fraction of the work put into Java it could be made fast enough to rival C++. It's one of the most striking wasted chances in the history of programming.