language_fan wrote:
Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:35:23 -0400, Jeremie Pelletier thusly wrote:
language_fan wrote:
Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:08:50 -0400, Jeremie Pelletier thusly wrote:
Ary Borenszweig wrote:
Just out of curiosity: have you ever programmed in Java or C#?
Nope, never got interested in these to tell the truth. I only did C,
C++, D and x86 assembly in systems programming, I have quite a
background in PHP and JavaScript also.
So you only know imperative procedural programming + some features of
hybrid OOP languages that are not even proper OOP languages.
This is what I know best, yeah. I did a lot of work in functional
programming too, but not enough to add them to the above list.
What is proper OOP anyways? It's a feature offered by the language, not
a critical design that must obey to some strict standard rules. Be it
class based or prototype based, supporting single or multiple
inheritance, using abstract base classes or interfaces, having funny
syntax for ctors and whatnot or using the class name or even 'this', its
still OOP. If you wan't to call me on not knowing 15 languages like you
do, I have to call you on not knowing the differences in OOP models.
I must say I have not studied languages that much, only the concepts and
theory - starting from formal definitions like operational or
denotational semantics, and some more informal ones. I can professionally
write code in only about half a dozen languages, but learning new ones is
trivial if the task requires it.
Generally the common thing for proper pure OOP languages is 'everything
is an object' mentality. Because of this property there is no strict
distinction between primitive non-OOP types and OOP types in pure OOP
languages. In some languages e.g. number values are objects. In others
there are no static members and even classes are objects, so called meta-
objects. In some way you can see this purity even in UML. If we go into
details, various OOP languages have major differences in their semantics.
What I meant above is that I know a lot of developers who have a similar
background as you do. It is really easy to use all of those languages
without actually using the OOP features in them, at least properly (for
instance PHP does not even have a real OOP system, it is a cheap rip-off
of mainstream languages - just look at the scoping rules). I have seen
Java code where the developer never constructs new objects and only uses
static methods because he fears the heap allocation is expensive.
Discussing OOP and language concepts is really hard if you lack the
theoretical underpinning. It is sad to say this but the best source for
this knowledge are academic CS books, but nowadays even wikipedia is
starting to have good articles on the subject.
I agree, Wikipedia is often the first source I check to learn on
different concepts, then I search for online papers and documentation,
dig into source code (Google's code search is a gem), and finally books.
I'm not most programmers, and I'm sure you aren't either. I like to
learn as much of the semantics and implementation details behind a
language as I can, only then do I feel I know the language, I like to
make the best out of everything in the languages I use, not specialize
in a subset of it.
I don't believe in a perfect programming model, I believe in many
different models each having their pros and cons that can live in the
same language forming an all-around solution. That's why I usually stay
away from 'pure' languages because they impose a single point of view of
the world, that doesn't mean its a bad one, I just like to look at the
world from different angles at the same time.
