Stephen De Gabrielle wrote on 12/27/18 4:47 PM:
I always wanted to ask if the prototype object model is a good idea or bad idea?
I think it's not a bad idea, but I think you probably wouldn't use it for general-purpose OOA, OOD, or OOP right now. For a long time, OO overwhelmingly embraced mostly the same class-instance-inheritance model. Recently, we're seeing some newly popular languages back off from that very familiar model, including dusting off some ideas like traits/interfaces and mixins/composition.
I currently suspect that prototype models might be most useful for *not-very-programmer-ish end user* HCI models, when you don't want to deal in conventional types, or you can't. My most recent example, the last few weeks, is finding a usable end-user semi-natural language DSL for nutrition tracking. Consider that you want to very rapidly capture information about what you cook and eat. You have concepts of ingredients and quantities. You might also have concepts like how you usually make your coffee, or a few sandwiches and soups you often make the same. You also have dishes that you make less-often or are one-offs. You have leftovers, and the leftovers can evolve. And you always want your nutritional intake tracked. It's looking like the conceptual model backing a quick semi-natural language for this might indeed be a prototype object model, in which there's a lot of like-that-but-different-and-distinct.
Maybe (just speculating, off the cuff) it turns out there's also a place for prototype object models in symbolic machine learning, in acquiring some variation on frame-based representations of knowledge.
Obligatory Racket: You can make your own prototype object model in Racket pretty easily, a number of ways. You can do some ways in an hour, or spend a day on linguistic tweaking, or spend a week or more making it faster or working through some ideas you thought of while you were working through it.
The same question applies to Morphic User Interface Construction Environment - good idea or bad idea?
I haven't had a chance to play with the latest work in this space, and maybe someone else here can talk about how the latest work conceptualizes.
It might be a coherent basket of things that you already see many places, and will increasingly see even more (direct manipulation user interfaces, composing/decomposing systems as interacting concurrent objects and aggregations/assemblies, maybe adapt to augmented reality interfaces for ubiquitous programmable things/materials in real space, etc.).
Also, who knows what happens, if large numbers of kids can build with this and other complex models during early developmental years? Maybe we start seeing new HCI that takes advantage of a facility with those models. Or we see new perspectives/understandings, due to the popularly expanded mental machinery. (They'll need the new powers, to deal with everything the last 20 years of CS did through dotcoms.)
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