Sunday, April 27, 2008

My OO My

No, I don't mean the song, but it's to do with Scandinavia. Mads Torgersen mentioned this during interview with Joe Armstrong (highly recommended, there is also a part II), and later I saw another reference in a paper: apparently there is "Scandinavian school of object orientation", sometimes compared to "American school".

Here are some insights on the difference between the two. The point is that the former is about concepts and philosophy, and the latter is about pragmatic aspects like software reuse and organization. I am not gonna pretend that I'm smart - all I know about it comes from searching Google, so you can go there and find out for yourself.

* On a side note, since I am linking to MSDN here, I want to say that even though my last post wasn't very favorable to Microsoft, to be fair - the company plays an important role in renaissance and democratization of functional programming (LINQ, F#, etc.), with guys like Mads Torgersen and Erik Meijer largely responsible.

3 comments:

Paul Beckford said...

Hi Yardena,

My guess on the US/Scandinavian split. Perhaps it has more to do with the prodigy of C++ (Java and C#) versus a more pure view of objects (Simula?, Smalltalk, Self, Beta and now Newspeak :)).

Not sure though. Just a guess. BTW, I don't think you need to aplogise for the MSDN link. Like you say Microsoft has been doing some good research for a while now and bringing it to market. Lots of good stuff is happening on the CLR. I would add Boo to the list as something to take a look at:

http://boo.codehaus.org/

I agree that LINQ is very interesting indeed!

Happy blogging.

Paul.

Yardena said...

Hi Paul,

Good to see you over here :-)

I think your interpretation is correct, and I surely hope for success of the new wave of "scandinavians".

Thanks for the reference to Boo - interesting and looks like a very useful tool - I'll keep a note just in case I work with CLR one day.

BTW according to this piece of entertainment, it's in the right direction as long as
Rodrigo doesn't shave
:-)

writing a term paper said...

It seems that the current definition of software engineering is still being debated by practitioners today as they struggle to come up with ways to produce software that is cheaper, better, faster.