I see something deeper in what Zed is saying. My first really strong experiences with programming came from the data-structures world in the late 80s at the University of Waterloo. There was an implicit view that one could decompose all problems into data-structures (and a few algorithms and a little bit of glue). My sense at the time was that the newly emerging concepts of OO were a way of entrenching this philosophy directly into the programming languages.
When applied to tasks like building window systems, OO is an incredibly powerful approach. If one matches what they are seeing on the screen with the objects they are building in the back, there is a strong one-to-one mapping that allows the programmer to rapidly diagnose problems at a speed that just wasn't possible before. But for many of the things that I've built in the back-end I find that OO causes me to jump through what I think are artificial hoops. Over the years I've spent a lot of time pondering why. My underlying sense is that there are some fundamental dualities in computational machines. Static vs. dynamic. Data vs. code. Nouns vs. verbs. Location vs. time. It is possible, of course, to 'cast' one onto the other, there are plenty of examples of 'jumping' particularly in languages wrt. nouns and verbs. But I think that decompositions become 'easier' for us to understand when we partition them along the 'natural' lines of what they are underneath. My thinking some time ago as it applies to OO is that the fundamental primitive, an object, essentially mixes its metaphors (sort of). That is, it contains both code and data. I think it's this relatively simple point that underlies the problems that people have in grokking OO. What I've also found is that that wasn't there in that earlier philosophy at Waterloo. Sure there were atomic primitives attached to each data-structure, but the way we build heavy-duty mechanics was more often to push the 'actions' to something like an intermediary data-structure and then do a clean simple traversal to actuate it (like lisp), so fundamentally the static/dynamic duality was daintily skipped over. It is far more than obvious that OO opened the door to allow massive systems. Theoretically they were possible before, but it gave us a way to manage the complexity of these beasts. Still, like all technologies, it comes with a built-in 'threshold' that imposes a limit on what we can build. If we are too exceed that, then I think we are in the hunt for the next philosophy and as Zed points out the ramification of finding it will cause yet another technological wave to overtake the last one. Just my thoughts. Paul.
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