http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html
On 16/07/10 00:09, Nick wrote:
I was thinking about this on the drive to work a few months ago. OO
does mimic the way we view the world in its focus on objects or
nouns. Think about how you would describe a scene to someone, you
would focus on the objects and then describe attributes or things they
are doing. "There is a road, its full of cars", "There is a
pedestrian, he is walking on the sidewalk", "There is a car, it's
honking at me because I almost hit it" (ok, maybe these thought
experiments should be saved for when I'm not operating a motor
vehicle). And thus its very natural for us to fall into OO concepts
when we are designing a system since that is effectively what we are
doing, describing the system.
But its really not a natural way for us to interact with the world
(which is closer to what we are doing when we actually write
software). There our focus becomes on actions, on verbs. To put it
in a programming form, I'm not thinking gasPedal.pushDown(), I'm
thinking pushDown(gasPedal). Now perhaps that particular example is
more of a linguistic thing, but think about it next time you are
interacting with something (as opposed to just describing it) in the
real world. Are you focused on the thing itself, or what you are
doing to it?
On Jul 15, 8:35 am, Carl Jokl<[email protected]> wrote:
I might argue that in the case of Object Oriented programming, a big
aspect of making it natural to learn is the way it mimics the real
world.
Objects can be created which mimic real world objects. The ability to
identify an object with objects in real life helps make the concepts
more
natural once you see how it works.
In the case of functional programming, I am not sure if there is a
real world analogy to draw upon. It is heavily inspired by mathematics
which isn't everybody's strongest suit. Granted
that plenty of maths exists in nature but still...
I learned Haskell and Prolog in University and haven't used them
since.
I have long believed in trying to use the right tool for the job. I
think a hybrid is the best way forward.
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