Re: XML DOM Binding for Ada 95 - matter of style

[Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Sun, 03 Aug 2003 16:42:26 GMT, "Matthew Heaney"
<matthewjheaney@earthlink.net> wrote:

>"Marin David Condic" <nobody@noplace.com> wrote in message
>news:3F2BA9C8.9030700@noplace.com...
>>
>> I see tagged types as the way to fully implement the Object Oriented
>> paradigm in Ada.
>
>To help convince you that inheritance-oriented programming is not the
>solution to all problems, I suggest you read this interview with Stepanov:
>
>http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html
>
>Here are the money quotes:
>
>"I find OOP technically unsound. It attempts to decompose the world in terms
>of interfaces that vary on a single type. To deal with the real problems you
>need multisorted algebras - families of interfaces that span multiple types.
>I find OOP philosophically unsound. It claims that everything is an object.
>Even if it is true it is not very interesting - saying that everything is an
>object is saying nothing at all. I find OOP methodologically wrong."
>
>Asked what he thought of Java, he replied that "...It keeps all the stuff
>that I never use in C++ - inheritance, virtuals - OO gook - and removes the
>stuff that I find useful."
>
>He says later that "...I spent years trying to find some use for inheritance
>and virtuals, before I understood why that mechanism was fundamentally
>flawed and should not be used."

1. What Stepanov addresses is actually not OO, or better to say not
ADT, but its existing implementations in the languages like C++ and
Ada. 

2. Maybe dynamic polymorphism is flawed, but then the static has to be
as well.

3. To say that everything is object, was indeed silly, but this was
rather a mantra than a concept. I hope that nobody took it seriosly.
(:-)) Fortunately, presently one hears this rubbish not so frequently
as it was pair years ago.

I think that his decision to switch to macros (aka C++ templates) was
caused merely by the state of ADT, which was too underdeveloped then
and remains underdeveloped now. It is easy to see that "families of
interfaces" is again an interface and that "multiple types" constitute
a type [a class-wide type, many thanks to Ada for this clarification].
Anyway, what could be an alternative? An untyped language? Who wants
that again?

---
Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov
www.dmitry-kazakov.de