Re: Tonight's Death Match: "Objective Heresy" vs. "Church of Objectology."

Patrick Logan (patrickl@servio.gemstone.com)
Fri, 13 Feb 98 16:27 PST


David Crook <dcrook@commwerks.com> writes:
> Doug Lea wrote:

>> 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.

Maybe so. OTOH Turing was reportedly impressed with Church's lambda
calculus. Maybe he would be more in the functional programming camp,
which is essentially a superset of the OOP camp anyway. Which leads to
another reason why some people "hate objects"...

* Some people "hate objects" because OOP is a limited form of
functional programming, and they don't like to see the
expressiveness reduced unnecessarily.

> ...nobody uses Turning machines as a basis for program
> design except compiler writers...

FWIW a lot of compiler writers use the lambda calculus, esp. in the
functional programming community.

-- 
Patrick Logan                 mailto:patrickl@gemstone.com
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