Re: Why and how do organizations select the OO

[alice!bs@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Bjarne Stroustrup)]

mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman @ George Washington University) writes

 > The point was not to tar OO experts as windbags,

I didn't think you were, though of course SOME are.

 > but to comment on the
 > state of things. The customer in this case is thrashing around, has
 > little knowledge of what's happening in the field, and is making purely
 > political/religious statements. My distress came from the fact that
 > the organization didn't seem really interested in finding out more
 > or get really educated.

and that's the real rub. Many organizations and people are so busy
``getting the job done'' or jumping on some bandwagon that they don't
want to take the time to learn anything new.

The real power of languages that support techniques beyond what is
directly supported by C/Pascal is exactly those techniques.

Ada supports data abstraction and C++ data abstraction and object-oriented
programming (let's quibble about the meaning of those words elsewhere
if we must; their exact meaning isn't important to what I'm trying
to say here) and unless you take the bother learning those techniques
you are not going to get anywhere near the benefits from Ada/C++ that
you might.

One way of expressing this is that companies (and individuals) wants mere
training (i.e. ways of using new tools without absorbing new concepts).
What they need is education (i.e. new concepts and their related techniques).
Ada without some understanding of data abstraction, etc. seems to me to
be very nearly just Pascal, and C++ without some understanding of data
abstraction, etc. is just C with better type checking.

I don't know about the Ada world, but in the C++ world we do have a problem
with teachers and textbook writers who miss the connection between concepts
and programming language constructs and thus miss the point and makes learning
unnecessarily difficult for the students.

 > They were - as is so often the case -  arguing
 > from nontechnical starting points. There are pro-OO and anti-OO factions
 > in the group, neither being especially scientific. There is also a 
 > faction that believes the Ada mandate should be followed in their case,
 > and a faction that is working harder to evade the mandate that they
 > would need to work to follow it.

 > Their state of knowledge of OO truly seemed to be "It's that stuff that
 > C++ has and Ada doesn't." Some in the group were quite surprised to
 > discover (from me) that Ada supports information hiding and private types.
 > Their eyes glazed over when I got to the intricacies of inheritance.

Maybe you focussed too much on the intricacies and too little on the
concepts :-) I don't experience serious problems getting the object-
oriented concepts and the C++ language mechanisms that support then
across - the problem comes when the ideas have to be applied to real
projects (exactly, as for the data abstraction concepts and the language
constructs that support them).