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From: rcopm@koel.rmit.oz (Paul Menon)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Re: software ICs (was Re: C++ vs Objective-C)
Message-ID: <326@koel.rmit.oz>
Date: Mon, 26-Oct-87 17:14:19 EST
Article-I.D.: koel.326
Posted: Mon Oct 26 17:14:19 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 30-Oct-87 06:46:07 EST
References: <1628@pdn.UUCP>
Organization: RMIT Comm & Elec Eng, Melbourne, Australia.
Lines: 46

>        At the recent OOPSLA'87 Conference in Orlando, Peter Wegner stood
> up and addressed the members of one of the Panel Discussions (I forget 
> which one) and voiced some of the same concerns about Object-Oriented
> Programming in general.  The banquet speaker, Michael Jackson, had a
> similar point of view. It seems that we are always looking for that
> *magic* and want to believe that we are capable of discovering something
> to better our lives.  Is OOP the answer?  Being a bit sceptic I would
> tend to say NO, but I'll wait until I have some experience under my belt
> first.  
> 
	To some, it isn't the magic we are after, it's the tedium we are
    not.  Granted, the way things are (and shall be for a while) no one
    expects miracles of any environment or language.  We all have to put in
    the hard work.  But if I wanted to write a tree management package 
    independent of the objects the tree stores (to cite but one example), 
    object oriented programming is the answer.  If I want to use that
    package over and over again in as many places as possible, what better
    way is there to do it by making it re-usable?  This is distinct from
    "Libraries" like those found in unix.  They operate on specific types,
    or, more lately, operate on types that have been explicitly "cited" to
    the routine (a la SunView).

      Computers are perfectionists, they assume nothing (yet).  Imagine if
    Einstein had to re-iterate all his founding work every time he presented
    a new paper - VERBATIM!.  I think he would have taken up golf.  But this 
    is exactly what is expected of programmers.  And all that founding work
    has to be scavenged (_HACKED_) from wherever it was, hoping that no
    errors have appeared in the process.  We call this re-inventing the wheel.

      If we are to get anywhere in AI, we have to get away from wheels.
    We cannot forget about any "inventions", but we shouldn't have to 
    explicitly prove something over and over again.  Anyone heard of Ramanujan?


"The absence of tedium IS magic"

Paul Menon.

    Dept of Communication & Electronic Engineering,
    Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology,
    124 Latrobe St, Melbourne, 3000, Australia
 
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