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Dave - Well stated. I've never been in the middle of this fray but all around it, and I have to say that I'm always puzzled by it. By the time Objective C came along I was ready for a "practical" object-oriented language. I jumped on the bandwagon and was hugely disappointed. I was disappointed by two things: That OO didn't live up to my expectations; That C++ rose up like a tide and washed ObjC out of the game for the most part. My own experience was that I was already an experienced enough programmer that most of what ObjC or C++ gave me, I had already learned to handle with raw C. The explicitness of "objects" rather than careful and clever use of structures and functions was a boon, but not a huge one. I had never learned Simula or Smalltalk but had sampled many other languages (APL, Prolog, and Snobol being some of my favorites for specific problem domains). While I had a degree in Mathematics rather than Computer Science, most of the abstract arguements about the value of "pure OO" have never moved me very much. As a pragmatist (completely different kind of pragmatist than Doug though <grin>) and a happy customer of Java, C++, and ObjC (thank you Steve Jobs), I still find the brouhaha over the differences distracting. I am happy to give over to the purists that C++ is a weak sister to "real" OO, but having never really felt that "real" or "forged" OO was as big of a revolution as often implied, I'm not that motivated by it. I'm glad to have it, but find it somewhat overrated. I realize I am a dinosaur in many ways. I can see how those who cut their teeth on various OO tools (authentic and/or forged) might find this a lot more personal, but I also know that many on this list have as much (or more) grey in their beards as I do. As I shared with Guerin in a private conversation... OO fell short of my expectations of what "Objects" should be. Composable Simulations and Agent Based Modeling provided a little of that back, but in turn, Agent Modeling fell far short of what I expected from "Agents". Without needing to disparage either OO or ABM as it is practiced, I see there is great utility in both, I am left to wonder if Computer Science is not hugely irresponsible in using up the best ideas/terms on fairly weak, early examples of what they are pursuing? In my own field, I find that we "claimed" Virtual Reality at least 20 years too early, probably more. Just to add a little more to my morning rant, I have to take a potshot at "Design Patterns" as well. I was a deep fan of Christopher Alexander long before the Gang of Four wrote "Design Patterns". I thought it insightful and clever that they discovered/recognized Alexander and did a fair job of applying his ideas to programming, but their book, the movement that went with it, etc. missed *so much* of Alexander's ideas that I was crestfallen. Is anybody else out there as disappointed as I with our propensity for claiming territory gained long before anything significant was actually gained? - Steve PS. Guerin - See what you started?
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