How do you define "object-oriented"?

Jarvis, Robert P. (Contingent) Jarvisb at timken.com
Fri Apr 26 20:38:16 UTC 2002


> From: cg at cdegroot.com [mailto:cg at cdegroot.com]
> C++ is a horrible complex mess - QED. 

Some people just can't give up the bits, bytes, and unnecessary complexity -
conquering the system and getting it to do something useful is such a
*challenge*!  :-)  A C programmer once challenged me to come up with
something, *anything*, that could be done faster Smalltalk than in C.  So I
said "OK - let's each write a program to calculate 1000! (one thousand
factorial)".  This guy went off and spent a couple evenings writing it out
in C - created his own large integer package, hammered on the debugger to
get things working, etc.  Came back with a nice little program that could
calculate 1000 factorial in some vanishingly small number of milliseconds.
He said something like, "It took me three hours to write this.  How long did
it take you to do it in Smalltalk?".  I said, "I haven't started yet.  Let's
see...".  So I fired up my Smalltalk system, typed

	1000 factorial

in a workspace, hit Ctrl-D to display the result, and said, "I dunno - how
long was that - 2 seconds?".  He got rather red in the face and stormed off,
claiming I'd "cheated".  Some people just don't understand "reuse".  <sigh>
 
> ...and C++ waits until the language has been enhanced with
> an OO-ness scale position operator.

Whatever it is, I'm sure it'll use yet another overload of the term
"virtual".  :-)

Bob Jarvis
Compuware @ Timken


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