Re: What's the easiest and/or simplest part of Linux Kernel?
Not in any way disputing your basic premise that it's hard, or
impossible, to do polymorphism and inheritance in C, with which I agree.....
And not to weigh in on whether an "object" is a "machine" or vice versa
(though a pretty good arguement can be made that objects can be viewed
as finite state machines - and you can find such arguements in the
literature)......
And also not to weigh in (much) about what's actually important about
OOP (Alan Kay has more than once pointed out that it's message passing
and isolation that are important, polymorphism and inheritance are just
what seem to get the attention.) By the way: really nice discussion of
the "state of OOP" at
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop
(on a completely un-related matter, I happened to be looking at Erlang
from an OO perspective and stumbled across this rather nice interview
with Rolph Johnson and Joe Armstrong - of "Design Patterns" and Erlang
fame, respectively).
Jerry Stuckle wrote:
And no, I did NOT refer to "reading a few pages on wikipedia and
writing a little php". I do not consider either to be reliable.
Rather, I referred to recognized experts in the field such as Booch,
Rumbaugh and Stroustrup.
Kind of flip-flopping to cite "recognized experts" after dismissing guys
like Donovan, Saltzer and Corbato as "But they never were that highly
regarded except in academia" - when discussing operating systems and
systems programming.
And then to cite Booch, Rumbaugh and Stroustrup re. OO programming (ok,
Stroustrup wrote C++) - but if you want to cite experts - how about Dahl
and Nygaard (Simula, pretty much invented software objects) and Alan Kay
(Smalltalk, pretty much invented OOP). Maybe Joe Armstrong (Erlang) for
a countervailing view.
But you're too caught up in your own little world to even try to
understand REAL experts. Your mantra is "I have my mind made up and
no one will change it".
Sounds more like you're describing yourself, Jerry.
First, you've got to understand who the "real experts" are, rather than
finding ones who simply backstop your pre-defined opinion (and.. experts
are nothing without citations). Beyond that, why is it that you always
seem to draw from narrow confines of IBM (or, where Booch and Rumbaugh
are concerned, Rational, now part of IBM). IBM is an important part of
the computing universe, no contest; but the field, and it's leading
edge, are much broader than just IBM.
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Reply to: