Hi Göran,

Göran Krampe wrote:
> Hi all Smalltalkers!
>
> Only cross posting to squeak and pharo (communities I know), because 
> this turned into a long post. But try reading it - I hope it is both 
> fun and perhaps interesting. :)
>
> On 02/11/2012 01:21 PM, Janko Mivšek wrote:
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> Again one interesting topic for this weekend to discuss. David Nolen, a
>> Lisp and JavaScript guy posted in his blog an article titled Illiterate
>> Programming [1] where he said:
>>
>> "...Yet I think Smalltalk still fundamentally failed (remember this is a
>> programming language originally designed to scale from children to
>> adults) because *Objects are really hard* and no-one really understands
>> to this day how to do them right...."
>
> As Hernan pointed out - it is programming that is hard, not *objects* 
> per se. While that is true, one can of course still reflect on the 
> aspects of OO and why people *perceive* it as hard.

There is a mistake in this discussion right from the start that nobody 
pointed out. When Alan says "Nobody knows how to do objects right" he's 
not talking about programing in an OO language, but about designing the 
language and system itself. I agree with this. I prefer Smalltalk to all 
the systems/languages done afterwards, trying to fix Smalltalk 
weaknesses. Besides, he praised many times the works of members of his 
various teams, and of members of this community.

WRT the usual comment, saying that it is hard to program well with 
objects and that this implies that objects are bad, is like saying the 
guitar is bad because it is not easy to play it really well. I took ten 
years of piano classes when I was a kid, but I'm not good enough to play 
in public, and I guess I'll never be. I'm not talented enough for that. 
The same can happen to others with programming, and with objects in 
particular. If the player is not good, it is not the instrument to blame!

>
> SIDENOTE: As Milan wrote later in the thread - the patterns movement 
> that Kent Beck started together with the Gang of Four led to the 
> creation of TONS of books fully packed with OO designs in various 
> domains. So yes, there is an *abundance* of books on OO design to find 
> *iff* one goes looking for it.
>
>> He links to Alan Kay post [2] back in 1998 where he talks about problems
>> with inheritance:
>>
>> "Here are a few problems in the naive inheritance systems we use today:
>> confusions of Taxonomy and Parentage, of Specialization and Refinement,
>> of Parts and Wholes, of Semantics and Pragmatics..."
>
> Of all OO mechanisms most agree that inheritance is the one that gets 
> abused the most... if we disregard the "abuse" one can find in so 
> called OO code that stems from it not being OO at all :)
>
> Alan writes "confusions" and I suspect he carefully avoids saying one 
> is wrong and the other is right, because its not that simple. Truth is 
> one can use inheritance differently - as long as it makes your life 
> better it can't really be argued to be "wrong". :)
>
> I think most OO developers goes through some "ladder of enlightenment" 
> going something like this:
>
> 0. You really have no clue and tend to confuse composition "parts and 
> whole" with inheritance. You just create a mess. Perhaps you avoid 
> this mess by reading a book or attending an OO course, but hey, who 
> does that in 2012? ;). But let's say you *do* read a book - proceed to 
> level 1...
>
> 1. You get all into Animals and other "inheritance" examples mirroring 
> the real world. Perhaps you get totally sucked into the "mirror the 
> real world"-idea. Thus, you try desperately to find "ISA" relations 
> among the domain objects and use those for inheritance, without really 
> thinking *why* that is a good idea. And sure, it often gets it fairly 
> right so it's a huge step forward. But let's pretend you now have 
> coded quite a bit and thus proceeds to level 2 :)
>
> 2. Specialization. After some time you start to understand 
> polymorphism and the substitution principle etc, so instead of blindly 
> testing if "A isa B" sounds right in your ears you start thinking in 
> terms of generalisation and specialization. And you see objects in 
> your head. You talk about them as if they are concrete and you can 
> hold them in your hand etc. Perhaps you even draw them on whiteboards 
> and envision them in different scenarios "talking to each other". If 
> you use a statically typed language this is where your road stops :). 
> You end up writing fairly good code, but your inheritance will 
> probably be totally focused on enabling polymorphism between objects, 
> which of course is not all bad. But hey, after a few years of 
> Smalltalking - proceed to level 3.
>
> 3. As a seasoned Smalltalker you eventually come down from your "OO 
> rush" and realize that... hey, wait a minute! Polymorphism is not 
> *tied* to class inheritance (unless you are trapped in some static 
> type system). In fact, you realize that class inheritance in Smalltalk 
> is "merely" a nice way of reducing the redundancy of code by creating 
> dependencies between separate abstractions of code. This realization 
> enables you to use inheritance in a more liberal fashion - which 
> probably means you tend to use it *less*. And instead you tend to "add 
> more objects" and use composition of objects more and more, relying on 
> brittle deep hierarchies of inheritance less and less.
>
> SIDENOTE: A really cool example of how powerful object composition is: 
> PetitParser by Lukas. For years we have been creating parsers by 
> generating code from specifications and suddenly Lukas decides that 
> hey, why not instead *compose* a parser from ...objects? It is so 
> obvious in retrospect, but the result is a tremendously nicer and more 
> powerful way of constructing parsers.
>
> You also conclude that while you *can* reuse behaviors and compose 
> behaviors using inheritance you are also aware that inheritance 
> creates a life cycle *dependency* between classes that you *may* or 
> *may not* want to have. Class inheritance is a brittle relation. Thus, 
> even if class A *can* inherit from B, you might decide not to - 
> because you anticipate that the development lineage will diverge, or 
> perhaps you have no control over A (library? other developer? bad 
> code?), and you do not want that dependency. But the up side is that 
> sometimes you *really* want that dependency, change superclass and bam 
> - affect all subclasses.
>
> Another obvious benefit of inheritance is of course "documentation 
> structure" that you and other developers can understand.
>
> ...well. Of course, the above was written sloppily and can of course 
> be refined or totally shot down. Feel free to do both! :)

Or praised. Very well said, Göran!

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich

> regards, Göran
>
> PS. Why oh why did Pharo lose the "double click on ? in the class 
> browser to see inheritance textually"-mechanism? :)
>