I was thinking about this on the drive to work a few months ago. OO does mimic the way we view the world in its focus on objects or nouns. Think about how you would describe a scene to someone, you would focus on the objects and then describe attributes or things they are doing. "There is a road, its full of cars", "There is a pedestrian, he is walking on the sidewalk", "There is a car, it's honking at me because I almost hit it" (ok, maybe these thought experiments should be saved for when I'm not operating a motor vehicle). And thus its very natural for us to fall into OO concepts when we are designing a system since that is effectively what we are doing, describing the system.
But its really not a natural way for us to interact with the world (which is closer to what we are doing when we actually write software). There our focus becomes on actions, on verbs. To put it in a programming form, I'm not thinking gasPedal.pushDown(), I'm thinking pushDown(gasPedal). Now perhaps that particular example is more of a linguistic thing, but think about it next time you are interacting with something (as opposed to just describing it) in the real world. Are you focused on the thing itself, or what you are doing to it? On Jul 15, 8:35 am, Carl Jokl <carl.j...@gmail.com> wrote: > I might argue that in the case of Object Oriented programming, a big > aspect of making it natural to learn is the way it mimics the real > world. > Objects can be created which mimic real world objects. The ability to > identify an object with objects in real life helps make the concepts > more > natural once you see how it works. > > In the case of functional programming, I am not sure if there is a > real world analogy to draw upon. It is heavily inspired by mathematics > which isn't everybody's strongest suit. Granted > that plenty of maths exists in nature but still... > > I learned Haskell and Prolog in University and haven't used them > since. > I have long believed in trying to use the right tool for the job. I > think a hybrid is the best way forward. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javapo...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
