Comment by glurgh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by glurgh | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think this is really an argument from authority since I'm not saying 'he's right because he has a PhD and teaches at a renowned university'. I'm saying that assuming he's ignorant of FP given both what he says in the paper and his background is silly and shallow.

It's not really fair to say that Aldrich 'misses' a discussion of object thinking, he just chooses to put the focus of that particular paper elsewhere - this is from the intro

Some of the advantages of object-oriented programming may be psychological in nature. For example, Schwill argues that “the object-oriented paradigm...is consistent with the natural way of human thinking” [28]. Such explanations may be important, but they are out of scope in this inquiry; I am instead in- terested in whether there might be significant technical advantages of object-oriented programming.

and

This success raises a natural question: Why has object-oriented programming been successful in practice?

Everyone reads these papers from different perspectives, so it's quite easy to say someone missed something (fair or not).

My criticism is that an analysis of OOP is incomplete if you avoid looking at...objects. It's like saying, we are going to ignore the objects themselves, and just focus on the technical features of the objects to see what the technical advantage of these features are. It is very reductionist...while objects favor a more holistic manner of thinking.

We probably (broadly) agree more than disagree. One reason FP/OOP comparisons are difficult is that FP is closely related to a mathematical formalism while OOP isn't and can't be. I think the tack he's taking is 'can we explain the popularity of OOP in terms of "technical" or really, "practical programming/software engineering" advantages'. It's a tricky needle eye to thread.

The objection 'that approach can't lead to useful insight' is a reasonable one but I don't think he's taking the approach out of ignorance or because he spaced out on something while typing it up - it's a deliberate choice, whatever its merits.

Ah, I never said he took this approach out of ignorance. I've talked about this with him before, and never found his arguments lacking.

It is nice that something is still going on in OOP.

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