On 2010-07-10, at 12:25 AM, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote:
> For quite some time I've been pondering the duality of the class/instance and
> method/context relations. In some sense, a context is an object created by
> instantiating its method, much like a normal object is instantiated from its
> class...
Self does just that:
http://labs.oracle.com/self/language.html
Io (following Self's example) does as well. In this recent video:
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop
Ralph Johnson talks about how long it takes for computing culture to absorb new
ideas (in his example, things like OO, garbage collection and dynamic message
passing) despite them being obvious next steps in retrospect. I think
prototypes could also be an example of this.
It seems as if each computing culture fails to establish a measure for it's own
goals which leaves it with no means of critically analyzing it's assumptions
resulting in the technical equivalent of religious dogma. From this
perspective, new technical cultures are more like religious reform movements
than new scientific theories which are measured by agreement with experiment.
e.g. had the Smalltalk community said "if it can reduce the overall code >X
without a performance cost >Y" it's better, perhaps prototypes would have been
adopted long ago.
- Steve
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