I spent MANY years training and conditioning myself to think about the world around me in terms of objects. From a programming perspective, I find myself always more comfortable dealing with objects in the sense in which Smalltalk and Java (and decidedly NOT C++) think about them. OOP languages and OODBMS tools have *always* been more productive for me than procedural and relational models because once I trained myself to "think in objects," those approaches felt -- and were -- unnatural to me.
Far from being the "buzz concept du jour," OOP has been around, viable and in many places on the globe an all-but-inviolate standard for more than 30 years.
Now, that is not to say or suggest that every programming language that isn't strict OOP isn't usable or useful. Far from it. I use Revolution and Transcript because, even though it's not an OO environment, it is what I refer to in my books as "object-LIKE." That is, it represents enough of an accommodation of the key ideas of object orientation to be usable and useful on medium-sized, single-programmer projects involving non-object data. But I must say that if I had a choice of using an equivalent development environment that was syntactically as clean as Transcript or Smalltalk or Python and gave me the advantages of Revolution (cross-platform delivery while developing on my platform of choice, true stand-alone creation, great widget library, transparent database access), I'd switch in a New York nanosecond. The truth is, no such tool exists yet.
So I would agree that the programmer who rejected Revolution out of hand without digging more deeply into the advantages it offers and shares with OO environments was hasty and ill-advised (and probably, as you say, more interested in eliminating alternatives than in finding the correct one). But to dismiss OO out of hand is, IMNSHO, equally short-sighted. As you so rightly say, the two big concerns are programmer productivity and code maintainability. And in those respects, Transcript is awfully hard to beat.
FWIW.
On Apr 30, 2005, at 7:21 AM, Rob Cozens wrote:
IMF(oole's)O, the programmer who ruled out RunRev as a development platform on the basis of it not being a true OOP language was simply looking for a reason to pan it rather than do the kind of in depth analysis required to properly evaluate its potential.
The bottom lines for software development are real-world productivity and code maintainability, not compliance with the "buzz concept de jour".
Rob Cozens CCW Serendipity Software Company
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dan Shafer, Co-Chair RevConWest '05 June 17-18, 2005, Monterey, California http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit/RevConWest
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