1. How it can be that people do or do not like objects.
What is there to like or not like? I suspect that `object' is the
term Turing or Von Neumann would have used instead of TM or automaton
if they had had the opportunity to build interesting software. The
defining characteristics of objects are just the same as the defining
characteristics of machines. Except a little broader in that
degenerate cases also count as objects yet not machines.
(OK, I admit to being a revisionist historian about all this, but so
what.)
I do understand how it can be that some people do not like particular
object-oriented programming languages, notations, terminology, or, for
that matter, particular objects.
2. How it can be that XML and other non-computationally-complete but
useful languages somehow serve as alternatives to objects.
Good description languages are nice. But they don't do anything
themselves. So you have to build software to do things with them. And
you are back to software design, which seems to have little to do with
XML et al except for the need to somehow link together structre and
behavior. Which seems to be a roundabout way of defining an OO
programming system.
Could someone please straighten me out about either of these?
-- Doug Lea, Computer Science Department, SUNY Oswego, Oswego, NY 13126 USA dl@cs.oswego.edu 315-341-2688 FAX:315-341-5424 http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/