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Dear Types members,
There is occasional, continuing speculation in the language design and
type system community regarding the industrial success of objects. The
"type/object distinction" discussion on the types list this spring
touched on this issue, for example. Many industrially-successful
programming languages are object-oriented; is this just marketing, or a
psychological phenomenon, or does it have a technical basis?
I have written an manuscript, to appear in the Onward! 2013 essay
proceedings, exploring a possible technical explanation for the success
of objects. The essay argues that objects (and object types, in
contrast for example to ADTs) facilitate interoperability between
different implementations of an abstraction, and that interoperability
is a critical requirement both for achieving architectural (large-scale,
framework-style) reuse, and for supporting software ecosystems. The
current draft of the manuscript is available at:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/papers/objects-essay.pdf
I would welcome feedback on the essay--I realize that its thesis may be
controversial, but even if some do not agree with it, I hope I will at
least have expressed the essay's argument clearly. Comments received by
this coming Monday, August 5th, are particularly appreciated, as I will
be able to incorporate them into the published version of the essay.
Cheers,
Jonathan Aldrich
