Re: OOPs!! When is a class not a class? (Re: Number/Specificality/Archetypes in Language)

Ray Brown wrote:

> On Thursday, September 23, 2004, at 09:57 , Keith Gaughan wrote:
>
>> Oh, for the time!
>
> Amen!! I'm busier now I'm retired than I have been for many a year.
>
>> JavaScript uses prototype-based OO, unlike the
>> class-based OO of most languages. The thing about POP is that it's
>> far more powerful and flexible than classed-based OO.
>
> My "darned scripting languages" was not meant to be serious.
Nah, I wasn't taking it seriously. That was just me being rather
enthusiastic about POP and scripting.

> I can well believe POP is more flexible and powerful. I still remember how,
> many years ago, I was really excited when I discovered Prolog - and that
> language is about as untyped as it's possible to get. One of the things I
> really liked about Prolog was its flexibility & power. Indeed, of all the
> languages I've used, Prolog still remains the one I most enjoyed using.
Ditto. First version I came across was Humboldt University Prolog on the
Acorn Archimedes. Spent many hours messing with it. It really opened up
a lot of new way of thinking about programming to me.

Prolog's a bit underappreciated, I think.

>> I don't have a lot of time to go into it. But I'll say that it's a
>> really bad idea to try and program JavaScript like a class-based
>> language.
>
> That I will not dispute for one moment. IME it is always a bad idea to try
> and program a language designed one basis in terms another with a
> different basis, sort of like programming (logic-based) Prolog as tho it
> was (procedural) Pascal - which I have seen, ach!!! It usually does mean..
Yup. I took AI in my last year in college (mainly just to have an excuse
to exercise my Prolog Kung-Fu), and few of my classmates seemed to get
the idea of writing code declaratively rather than purely procedurally.
Sure, you need to have the procedural implications of what you're
writing in mind when you're developing in Prolog, but their brains were
so addled by Java that they just didn't get that.

K.

--
Keith Gaughan -- talideon.com
The man who removes a mountain begins
by carrying away small stones...
                          ...to make place for some really big nukes!