[plug] [why not staroffice]

[The Thought Assassin]

On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Oliver White wrote:
> Oliver White wrote:
> > The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > > > Very little non-trivial programming isnt.
> > > I would dispute that, but I feel I am probably just disputing your meaning
> > > of "non-trivial". Any program which must do extensive interactive
> > > (interacting with it's environment, not necessarily a person) IO must be
> > > procedural to a certain extent, since it must respond to temporal events.
> I find this comment a little strange, since OO's most popular application is
> arguably event driven programming. Smalltalk is a good example. 
You seem to imply that object-orientation and procedurality are mutually
exclusive. (but I know you are aware that this is not the case) Smalltalk
is an object-oriented procedural language, just like Java or C++.

> Popular OO languages mix object orientation with other paradigms,
> certainly. The other paradigm may be functional, logical or procedural.
Yep. But how many logical or functional programs (OO or otherwise) do you
know that deal mainly with temporal/event-driven/interactive IO?

> Point and click programming has characterised the OO paradigm for a
> while now, and as such involves a lot of events and responses to events.
It certainly has, but it has been OO procedural programming all the way.

> A response need not be procedural.
No,it needn't, but try think of a counterexample. :)

> Or have I missed something?
I think perhaps you have missed what I was replying to. I was replying to
the idea that "Very little non-trivial programming isn't procedural". I
was explaining why, IME, "Very little visible programming isn't
procedural". I wasn't at all saying that "Very little visible programming
is object-oriented", though I certainly believe that far too little is OO.

> > import java.io.Event;
A case in point: Event-driven programming done in a procedural language.

-Greg