On 7/5/07, Jaime Metcher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Sean, let me ask you a question. You've been involved in language design in the past.
For many years, yes. Mostly it's been fun (but sometimes it can be really tedious when a bunch of very pedantic people argue for months over some small piece of semantics).
Language design turns into the exploration of abstractions and debates about how things "should" work - how to achieve more DWIM.
Those are very non-productive discussions :) The design of most languages is driven by a vision and that tends to guide what goes into the language and what doesn't.
Are you just over all of that - or are the abstractions that I'm interested in exploring just spectacularly non-interesting to you?
For an existing language, these abstract discussions are fairly pointless. I'm interested in specific discussions about specific problems.
The specific problem is, for me, lack of DWIM.
That's not a specific problem. That's an abstract concept and extremely subjective. It's exactly the kind of non-productive discussion that I'm talking about. Now, I'm not denying that those discussions can be a lot of fun... :)
It's entirely personal - CF makes me repeatedly flip in and out of object-think
Why? Let's try to get to the bottom of that. I think a lot of people who are fairly new to OO, construct some very fixed mental model about "what is OO" and then have a hard time actually learning OO. The problem (for them) is that they've often constructed a mental model based on a single language (usually Java in the CF world) and so if CF does things differently, they can't apply "OO" to CF. This is why I recommend people learn multiple languages. The more languages you learn, the more varied your mental model and the easier it is to apply a given situation. In particular, some constructs that people insist "are" OO are actually not present in several OO languages (interfaces spring to mind). This comes back to my (frequent) comment that there is no one true way to do OO. I see a lot of people blocked on problems because they want the "perfect" way to do OO (to match their fixed mental model). As Gustave Flaubert once said "Perfection is the enemy of the good." -- Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/ "If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." -- Margaret Atwood You are subscribed to cfcdev. To unsubscribe, please follow the instructions at http://www.cfczone.org/listserv.cfm CFCDev is supported by: Katapult Media, Inc. We are cool code geeks looking for fun projects to rock! www.katapultmedia.com An archive of the CFCDev list is available at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
