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

David Crook (dcrook@commwerks.com)
Fri, 13 Feb 1998 15:55:46 -0800


Doug Lea wrote:
>
> Two things I (quite seriously) do not understand:
>
> 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.

Yes, but nobody uses Turning machines as a basis for program design
except compiler writers, unhappy ungraduate students doing an assignment
and a few odd people who program in assembly code out of spite.
>
> 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.

Well I just finished chapter one in "The Essential Distributed Object
Survial Guide", this is what I was opposed to...

"By 1997/1998 all software developed will be using the distributed
object model".

Either the dates on my copy of the book are defective or somebody had
better call Microsoft and tell them to stop work on Office and their
other applications immediately.

I percieve an attitude from some members of the OO and dist-obj camp
that their methodologies are going to replace EVERYTHING and that book
isn't helping any. Well, they are just wrong.

> 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.

I've never claimed that data description languages were going to be an
alternative to objects. I've just stated that distrubted objects just
aren't going to completely replace traditional applications or even
traditional client-server applications.

> Could someone please straighten me out about either of these?

Glad to be of service.

Dave