Re: What is wrong with OO ?

[adam@irvine.com (Adam Beneschan)]

In article <32B758D7.61EF@deep.net> tansel@deep.net writes:

 >Why is it difficult to accept any questions, comments and criticisms
 >about procedure orientation? If you accept the premise that procedure
 >orientation was as good as you say it is, how do you explain a big
 >failure rate in complex software, and lost billions? 

It would take me some time to look over and prepare a response to your
entire response to my post (assuming I decide to respond at all rather
than let others address your points).  But I can deal with this one
now.

Nowhere did I say that procedure orientation is immune from criticism
or question.  In fact, I've been working as a programmer for 20 years,
and almost since the beginning I've had a sense that there should be a
better way.  I've always been interested in languages with totally
different paradigms, such as "pure" Lisp, Prolog, Backus' FP, Lucid,
dataflow, some 4GL ideas, more recently Haskell, and several other
experimental languages that have gotten write-ups in SIGPLAN notices
and have since seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth.
(Whatever happened to M'PAL?)  OO is, in fact, another idea that I've
been really interested in, and I think it's a significant step forward
in software engineering.  (I did, after all, describe it as a "better
mousetrap.")

What I object to is not the idea that OO is better than what we were
doing before (I think it is), nor that "procedure orientation" is
flawed (I'm sure it is).  Rather, it's the black-and-white tone of
your post, that OO is completely wonderful, that "procedure
orientation" has no value whatsoever, and that programmers who don't
see things that way are simply unwilling to change, or unwilling to
try something new, or have been using procedural techniques so long
that they are stuck with them, or just hate new ideas or some such.
The fragment I've quoted above is a symptom of this kind of thinking;
apparently because I criticized your first post, you've assumed,
without justification, that I find it difficult to accept questions or
criticisms about procedure orientation.  Nothing could be further from
the truth.

                                -- Adam