This half hour talk from Zed Shaw is making rounds, https://vimeo.com/43380467
The first half is typical complaints about broken w3 standards and processes. The second half is his own observations on the difficulties of teaching OOP. He then suggests that OOP is an unnatural programming paradigm and that the problems of the web stem from the problems of OOP. My take: I agree with Zed that the dominant "OOP" view of reality no longer serves us for creating the systems of the future. I imagine that this will be a hard pill to swallow because we (programmers) have internalized this way of looking at the world and it is hard to *see* anything in the world that doesn't fit our patterns. The hint for me comes at 22 minutes in to the video. Zed mentions OOP's mismatch with relational databases and its emphasis on request-response modes of communication. Philosophically, OOP encourages hierarchy. Its unidirectional references encourage trees. Request-response encourages centralized control (the programmer has to choose which object is "in charge"). Ted Nelson also complains about hierarchical vs. relational topologies with respect to the web's historical development, particularly unidirectional links. I've been reading (and rereading) Sutherland's 1963 Sketchpad thesis ( http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf ) and it strikes me that philosophically it is founded on *relationships* rather than *hierarchy*. Internally, references are always stored bi-directionally. It presents the user with a conceptual model based on creating constraints (i.e. relationships) between shapes. Chapter 7 has been particularly hard for me to grok because his "recursive merging" has no good analogue in OOP inheritance strategies as far as I know. Here he takes a structure A (a network of things and their relationships) and merges them onto another structure B by specifically associating certain things in A with things in B. This operation creates new relationships in structure B, corresponding to the analogous relationships in structure A. Inheritance by analogy. He claims to get quite a bit of leverage from this strategy. Toby _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
