[plug] OO

[Oliver White]

The Thought Assassin wrote:

> 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++.

Ok... this is where I get a little over my head... however...

>From what I've been taught, Smalltalk is *pure* OO, without any procedural bits
whatsoever. However, I'm not that much of a language lawyer that I could argue the
point succinctly. All I'm saying is that you *may* be wrong here.

> > 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?

My friend wrote 'Hangman' in Mercury. ;-)

Seriously, there was talk about writing our MMORPG server in a logic/OO language.
It was a popular choice, and perhaps the best choice but for the fact that only a
couple of programmers on the team knew it.

> > 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.

Again... take a look at smalltalk and give examples of how it has procedural
features. I'm happy to be wrong. :-)

> > 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.

Fair call.

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

Thus my retreat to smalltalk. :-)

--
Oliver White