Am Dienstag, dem 06.01.2026 um 16:10 -0700 schrieb Duke Normandin: > On Tue, 6 Jan 2026 14:29:28 -0500 > Mark Bratcher <[email protected]> wrote: > > > It's not easy diving into OOP at this level without general OOP > > concepts and purpose, which are independent of the language being > > used. > > Thanks you for your detailed post! Although I _am_ aware of the "4 > Pillars of OOP", I'm not intimately familiar with them. > > I've been hacking code since 1981 or so - never using OOP - but > using Perl, C, PHP, various Lisps & Schemes. > > The Smalltalk code I wrote was intended to created a > function/method that could be called in order to return a > temperature using a particular scale. > > I was not interested in what "universe" the "object" lived in that > I needed the temperature for. Just like I the `abs' function > doesn't care what its given argument pertains to. `abs' is simply a > built-in function, or one living it a "math" library/module/package. > > It seems to me that OOP insists on creating mini universes for > everything and linking these universes together using inheritance, > as well as creating convoluted rules as to what can done, seen, > how and when. > > Maybe it's just the Smalltalk syntax that is getting in my way. I'm > going to try some other OOP supported language to see if the whole > process becomes more intuitive for me. > > Thanks for yours and others' input!
No, you are quite right. Functional programming is best made top-down, whereas object programming is best made bottom-up. And if you are used to program top-down, then the bottom-up approach looks convoluted. Infact the first tries are always convoluted. It is always the experience that you will find out while programming that the way you thought about your objects does not fit really. It needs some experiences to get into it. Bottom-up also means that there is no real final destination that you aim at. You are extending your objects and they get more and more functionality until you decide you are done with it. That's why I did place "temperature" and the "scale" already in a kind of universe, because certainly they have some meanings for you in reality, and you could even model the meanings in your objects. regards Wolfgang
