On Sat, 14 Jul 2007 06:01:56 +0200, Bruno Desthuilliers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Chris Carlen a écrit : >> Hi: >> >> From what I've read of OOP, I don't get it. I have also found some >> articles profoundly critical of OOP. I tend to relate to these articles. >> === 8< === >> >> Hence, being a hardware designer rather than a computer scientist, I am >> conditioned to think like a machine. I think this is the main reason >> why OOP has always repelled me. > >OTOH, OO is about machines - at least as conceveid by Alan Key, who >invented the term and most of the concept. According to him, each object >is a (simulation of) a small machine. Oh you young'uns, not versed in The Ancient Lore, but filled with self-serving propaganda from Xerox PARC, Alan Kay, and Smalltalk adherents everywhere! As a few more enlightened have noted in more than one thread here, the Mother of All OOP was Simula (then known as SIMULA 67). All Alan Kay did was define "OOPL", but then didn't notice (apparently--though this may have been a "convenient oversight") that Simula satisfied all the criteria so was actually the first OOPL--and at least 10 years earlier than Smalltalk! So Kay actually invented NONE of the concepts that make a PL an OOPL. He only stated the concepts concisely and named the result OOP, and invented yet another implementation of the concepts-- based on a LISP-like functional syntax instead of an Algol-60 procedural syntax, and using message-passing for communication amongst objects (and assumed a GUI-based IDE) (and introduced some new terminology, especially use of the term "method" to distinguish class and instance procedures and functions, which Simula hadn't done) . As Randy Gest notes on http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html, "The major ideas in Smalltalk are generally credited to Alan Kay with many roots in Simula, LISP and SketchPad." Too many seem to assume that some of these other "features" of Smalltalk are part of the definition of an OOP, and so are misled into believing the claim that it was the first OOPL. Or they claim that certain deficiencies in Simula's object model--as compared to Smalltalk's--somehow disqualifies it as a "true OOPL", even though it satisfies all the criteria as stated by Kay in his definition. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula and related pages, and "The History of Programming Languages I (HOPL I)", for more details. Under a claim of Academic Impunity (or was that "Immunity"), here's another historical tid-bit. In a previous empolyment we once had a faculty applicant from CalTech who knew we were using Simula as our introductory and core language in our CS program, so he visited Xerox PARC before coming for his inteview. His estimate of Alan Kay and Smalltalk at that time (early 80s) was that "They wanted to implement Simula but didn't understand it--so they invented Smalltalk and now don't understand _it_!" wwwayne === 8< === -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
