Re: I use Eiffel! and other "strange tongues"!

[kennel@nospam.lyapunov.ucsd.edu (Matt Kennel (Remove 'NOSPAM' to reply))]

On Sat, 02 Aug 1997 10:51:32 -0600, Ian Nelson <> wrote:
:Walt Howard wrote:
:
:>         I think OOP is the terminal paradigm. It is like the wheel.
:> We're there. We've arrived at the proper way to build software.
:> We may make some minor adjustments in the future but the paradigm
:> itself will be our computing core for hundreds, if not thousands
:> of years. But that's just speculation of course.
:
:I kind of agree with this to some extent.

I agree and disagree.

OO is hardly the terminus, but its useful ideas will remain in some form
or another.

Historical precedent: 

Fortran I introduced the "Subroutine" in a high level langauge to the
world. 

We program with nothing like that Fortran, and yet that idea has still
remained the single most important idea in software engineering, for entirely
legitimate reasons. 

The only reason that software engineering even exists, of course, is because
of the stored program, so I guess that's even more fundamental.  

-- 
*        Matthew B. Kennel/Institute for Nonlinear Science, UCSD           -
* "People who send spam to Emperor Cartagia... vanish! _They say_ that
* there's a room where he has their heads, lined up in a row on a desk...
* _They say_ that late at night, he goes there, and talks to them... _they
*- say_ he asks them, 'Now tell me again, how _do_ you make money fast?'"