From: James Cunningham <jameshcunningham@...>
Date: 2007-04-18T08:00:07+09:00
Subject: Re: IDEs, syntactic vs. semantic highlighting, etc.

On 2007-04-17 17:06:22 -0400, Chad Perrin <perrin@apotheon.com> said:

> On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 12:45:22AM +0900, Jeremy Tregunna wrote:
>> On 16-Apr-07, at 8:53 PM, Chad Perrin wrote:
>>> 
>>> That's really saying some awful things about Java -- not that I'm
>>> all that surprised.  Perl's OO is ugly as sin (and I'm a fan of Perl,
>>> saying this).  Sure, it's not as awful as PHP's and VB's OOP features,
>>> but it's not exactly elegant by any stretch.
>>> 
>>> I must agree that, judging by my own experience, Ruby really does get
>>> object oriented programming substantially "right".
>> 
>> Without hijacking this thread and making it about prototype
>> languages, I really do find statements like this cute (not
>> necessarily funny, but cute). While Ruby's Classes (and Smalltalk's
>> too) are just objects, it seems weird to me to separate the two
>> concepts. So any statement like that makes me wonder what kind of
>> exposure to object-oriented languages one has--or rather, lack of
>> exposure to many.
> 
> That sounds slightly condescending.
> 
> I haven't dealt with object oriented programming in a great many
> languages.  I've run up against it in C++, Object Pascal, Objective C,
> PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, and VB, at least.  I may have forgotten a
> couple.  I happen to like Ruby's more than Obj-C's, which I tend to like
> more than that of any of the rest of the languages I've mentioned (as
> far as I recall -- I don't remember OOP in Object Pascal much, for
> instance).  I like the general structure of OOP in Python more than any
> of the rest of them except Ruby, but I dislike Python in general, so it
> loses out.
> 
> Does that give you a clearer idea of where my comments are arising?

It was incredibly condescending, for what it's worth, in addition to 
being wrong-headed. Prototype-oriented languages are overwhelmingly 
outnumbered by class-oriented OO languages.

That's not to say that prototype-oriented languages aren't neat. IO[1] 
is one; TADS[2] is another, understandably not often considered (given 
its limited scope). I've been playing with IO quite a bit the past few 
days and, frankly, I'm just about in love it.

(There are no classes, and no inheritance; objects are cloned from 
other objects and modified as necessary.)

Best,
James

[1] http://www.iolanguage.com/about/
[2] http://www.tads.org/