From: ruby talk <ruby.talk.list@...>
Date: 2005-01-27T05:28:17+09:00
Subject: Re: New user questions

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 04:13:58 +0900, Ben Giddings
<bg-rubytalk@infofiend.com> wrote:
> Robert Klemme wrote:
> > IMHO one of the major advantages of Ruby is that it's OO all over while
> > Perl's OO was retrofitted.
> 
> Does anybody know offhand if Python's OO was retrofitted?  I used Python
> back in '97, but don't really remember the details too well.  Python's
> OO sure has that "tacked on" feel, what with the underscores and "self"
> parameters and all, but maybe it was just a really odd design decision?
> 

Accordin to http://www.network-theory.co.uk/docs/pylang/ref_103.html
"Python was created in the early 1990s by Guido van Rossum at
Stichting Mathematisch Centrum (CWI) in the Netherlands as a successor
of a language called ABC. "

Also, http://www.artima.com/intv/python2.html
" Guido van Rossum: In the early 1980s, I worked as an implementer on
a team building a language called ABC at Centrum voor Wiskunde en
Informatica (CWI). I don't know how well people know ABC's influence
on Python. I try to mention ABC's influence because I'm indebted to
everything I learned during that project and to the people who worked
on it."

"ABC's design had a very clear, sharp focus. ABC was intended to be a
programming language that could be taught to intelligent computer
users who were not computer programmers or software developers in any
sense. "

http://rds.yahoo.com/S=79143:D1/CS=79143/SS=96744554/SIG=11m9b9o9b/*http%3A//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_%28programming%29

I get the sense that the main goal in Python was not to build an OO
language, but to employ OO concepts (and others) to the extent that
they help create a language suitable for beginners.   It seems that if
theory or design purity would get in the way of a newbie quickly
picking up the language, then theory + purity got chucked.

Perhaps Python could be thought of as a excellent attempt to clean up ABC?