From: Stu <stu@...>
Date: 2011-06-08T06:12:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Object-Oriented thinking

It's interesting you bring up biological cells. Peter Small has an
interesting take on the paradigm which is essentially the same thing.
He wrote a book to illuminate the idea using macromedia director and
the lingo programming language. Interesting enough the syntax for a
constructor in that language that was a method called 'birth' which
was later renamed 'new'. It's an interesting concept. If you need a
visual alias birth new in your class Class and see how it looks
birthing an object. Seeing objects as living breathing things is a
smart well though out was of seeing constructors/deconstructors.

The basic biological concept goes like this:

Information processing within a cell is analogous to computer
processing. Instead of registers, the processing of information in a
cell is organized through surface interactions and shape distortions
of chemical molecules. In this way, every human cell acts like a very
powerful computer: reading programs, instructions and data from the
genome. The genome is essentially your template for your programs and
data.

Proteins, which are specified by DNA sequences on the cell's genome,
mix and combine with each other to form complex structures. These
complex structures, in turn, mix and combine among themselves to form
even more complex structures which in turn recombine in a multitude of
ways to provide the wide variety of organic mechanisms and structures
which together make up the living human form. The whole process is
based upon is broken down to the use of modular molecular units which
are duplicated and combined into different arrangements. This
duplication and combining of modular components is the basis of
object-oriented programming.

The biological genome also creates and sends chemical messages to
itself and to other molecular complexes within the cell. These
chemical messages initiate cascades of chemical reactions. This is
exactly analogous to which how method arguments might trigger cascades
of procedures and commands inside methods.

Molecular messages can also pass through cell walls, allowing cells to
communicate with each other. The billions of cells which make up the
human body are linked together though an information system consisting
of a vast complexity of chemical gradients and inter-cellular
movements of molecules. Cells as computer, all linked together in an
information carrying network, could be a suitable model for an
information system such as the Internet.
-------------
This is my favorite metaphor for new to OOPS programmers and explains
the S in the acronym which is SYSTEMS. Makes you almost want to
explore AI programming and simulations. You can begin to see some
concepts such as computer virus infecting memory locations. It also
predates the design-patterns documentation when programmers still
implemented such things innately vs learned.

Though for someone new to programming all together the mechanical
angle which is simple enough to state:  a variable that holds a
reference to a script template in memory.

I'd be interested in reading more about this metaphor. Did Kay write
anything I can see? Link or book? I love paradigms =)

~Stu

2011/6/7 Jörg W Mittag <JoergWMittag+Ruby@googlemail.com>:
> David Masover wrote:
>> On Wednesday, May 25, 2011 01:02:36 AM Chad Perrin wrote:
>>> I think your description of the object model and how you think of it is
>>> excellent, and it very closely approaches the way I think about it,
>>> though I think some of the points you make come off a bit more subtly
>>> than they would if I tried to explain it.
>> Thank you!
>>
>> I actually should give credit to... someone. I'm sure these ideas aren't
>> entirely my own, but I don't remember where they come from.
>
> That would be none other than Alan Kay himself.
>
> Well, actually, he described objects as their own little independent
> *computers*, not *programs* as you did, but the rest of your
> description is pretty close. (I guess that would make the *methods*
> the programs.)
>
> I'm not entirely sure what the *exact* connection is (maybe Alan Kay
> interned at ARPA?) but Alan Kay *knew* about the architecture of the
> ARPAnet (what we would now call the Internet and specifically the idea
> of messaging as implemented in TCP/IP) when he started to think about
> object-orientation.
>
> He thought that independent machines communicating over the network by
> messaging, with no shared memory, was a *brilliant* way to design
> complex distributed communication systems, and if it's good enough to
> design a worldwide information system, it surely would be good enough
> to design programs, right?
>
> This is the way that pretty much all of his team thought about (and
> still does, if you listen e.g. to recent interviews with Dan Ingalls)
> object-orientation. Another view that is more peculiar to Alan Kay
> himself, is thinking of objects as biological cells. (This is his
> biology minor showing through.)
>
> jwm
>
>