[self-interest] Questions about Self

[Welch, Ronald P (US)]

David,

Thanks very much for your insightful response. I am a huge fan of Mark Miller's work as well, and my admiration and for respect for your work goes without saying, of course. (But I will say it anyway, you are awesome :)

I concur with your point about the deep differences that arise in object orient programing systems based their underlying paradigm. But to me, the fundamental idea that makes all the paradigms related, at least to some degree, is the isight about messaging between the objects being the essence, the heart if you will, of all the paradigms. The details can diverge from there with, to your point, far ranging effect, however.

Thanks again,
Ron
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On Jun 26, 2016, at 3:04 PM, David Ungar ungar at me.com<mailto:ungar at me.com> [self-interest] wrote:

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Yes, but I have a long-standing debate with Mark Miller, whom I respect beyond words. And a long-standing unease about trying to understand one paradigm in terms of another according to the sort of argument in this link.

Here’s my canonical example: Back in the day, Schemers would tell me that Smalltalk blocks were just Scheme lambdas. Yet, in Smalltalk, every control structure uses blocks (and dynamic dispatch), while in Scheme cond is a primitive, even though it could have been done differently. From a cognitive psych point of view, (see Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by Lakoff IIRC), blocks are more basic than lambdas. The syntax is much shorter, and they are the fundamental building blocks of control in ST. Even though the interpreter might look similar for the two, there are deep differences in the process of programming, the patterns people reach for, debuggability (including support by the tools), etc.

So I always worry, when I read that sort of argument.

Whew! Didn’t intent to rant.

Thanks,

- David



On Jun 25, 2016, at 10:36 AM, 'Welch, Ronald P (US)' Ronald.P.Welch at BAESYSTEMS.com<mailto:Ronald.P.Welch at baesystems.com> [self-interest] <self-interest at yahoogroups.com<mailto:self-interest at yahoogroups.com>> wrote:


A third way of looking at objects, which I rather like, is the lambda-based perspective:

http://erights.org/elib/capability/ode/ode-objects.html

The last paragraph quotes Dr. Alan Kay…

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On Jun 25, 2016, at 5:39 AM, Stephen De Gabrielle spdegabrielle at gmail.com<mailto:spdegabrielle at gmail.com> [self-interest] wrote:

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So we have prototypes (self & JavaScript) and classes (sometimes added to JavaScript).

Is there another way?

S.


On Sat, 25 Jun 2016 at 04:23, 'Jason Grossman' spam-me at xeny.net<mailto:spam-me at xeny.net> [self-interest] <self-interest at yahoogroups.com<mailto:self-interest at yahoogroups.com>> wrote:

I wrote:

> I just re-watched Alan Kay's famous talk "The Computer Revolution
> Hasn't Happened Yet", and it sounds to me like a very good argument
> against classes, although I doubt that he meant it to be!


And I've just noticed that Alan Kay has recently (this week!) said:

> I liked Self. "Good OOP" is still waiting for a much better notion to
> replace the idea of a "Class"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851

Jason

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Kind regards,
Stephen
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Bigger than Scheme, cooler than Clojure & more fun than CL.(n=1)
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