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From: 6111231@PUCC.BITNET (Peter Wisnovsky)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk,comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Object oriented systems
Message-ID: <1414@PUCC.BITNET>
Date: Mon, 1-Dec-86 17:24:02 EST
Article-I.D.: PUCC.1414
Posted: Mon Dec  1 17:24:02 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 3-Dec-86 21:48:38 EST
Reply-To: 6111231@PUCC.BITNET
Distribution: world
Organization: Princeton University Computing Center, Princeton, New Jersey
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Xref: mnetor comp.lang.smalltalk:21 comp.lang.pascal:11

I just attended a lecture called "Why object oriented languages are hard
to learn", although it might have been better titled "why smalltalk 80
is hard to learn". It was given by a person from PARC called (I think)
Micheal O'Shea, talking about the results of a study into why so few
people are using Xerox's pet language. Basically, the lecturer had
found that very few people (he said only one that he knew of) had
really mastered the whole (all 2000 object types and 500 message types)
and that this was the reason that only (he claimed) 4 major software
packages had been implemented in the language. He also found that
the problem was not the basic concept of concurrent objects, but that
1: the metaobjects
2: the size
3: the difficulty of getting a realtime graphical view of objects
4: the size
were among the major problems (particularly the size: unfortunately I
did not take notes). He said that a group he is working with is developing
a new implementation to be called deltatalk that will have integrated
metaobjects, be much less extras, and have graphics viewing tools:
oh yes, the syntax (casing, mathematical stuff and general stuff) would
also be simplified and standardized. He also talked about other new languages
that used object oriented stuff like Object Logo, Object Pascal, and interlisp
(I don't know how new that is) and implied that they had greater real
functionality because they had the basic concept but not the difficult
to learn masses of st80 functions, and that he had found that programmers
in such situations will generally not take advantage of these more elegant
constructs anyway because they are too difficult to learn.
 
As a programmer who has been thinking that objects might come in handy
for implementing certain projects I am working on on a Mac this information
told me:
Don't bother with Mac ST80: one needs 4meg RAM and 300 meg disk space
*Try object pascal (the mpw version)
*Wish for Lightspeed pascal with objects (anyone know when?)
*take a look at object logo for an introduction to object oriented programming.
 
any comments?
Peter Wisnovsky
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