Jeff Heon <jfh...@gmail.com> writes:
> I'm puzzled when we say that Clojure is not particularly OO, but using
> protocols and datatypes feel OO to me,
> except that the namespace of the protocol method implementations is
> decoupled from the namespace of the type.
>
> Perhaps my definition of OO is too loose and I should think of
> protocols as "just" abstraction & polymorphism.
When people use the term OO they usually specifically mean traditional
imperative class-based OO as implemented by popular languages like Java
and C++. They might also count imperative prototype-based OO like
JavaScript.
To quote the Wikipedia page on OOP:
Benjamin C. Pierce and some other researchers view as futile any
attempt to distill OOP to a minimal set of features. He nonetheless
identifies fundamental features that support the OOP programming
style in most object-oriented languages:
* Dynamic dispatch
* Encapsulation
* Subtype polymorphism
* Object inheritance
* Open recursion
Clojure has some of those features, but it is sufficiently different
from the traditional model that I would consider "not particularly OO" a
valid, if not particularly useful description. There are certainly
similarities though, after all Clojure tries to solve similar problems.
If you consider idiomatic Clojure code to be strongly OO then you would
definitely have to classify idiomatic Haskell and maybe even idiomatic
Scheme similarly. In which case the distinction starts to become not
very useful and basically just devolves to "has some sort of
user-definable data type system" and there are very few general-purpose
programming languages which lack one.
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