Re: The wisdom of the object mentors (Was: Searching OO Associations with RDBMS Persistence Models)

From: S Perryman <a_at_a.net>
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 11:24:00 +0100
Message-ID: <e6m3h4$5oe$1_at_nntp.aioe.org>


"Robert Martin" <unclebob_at_objectmentor.com> wrote in message news:2006061312003443658-unclebob_at_objectmentorcom...

> On 2006-06-02 04:06:37 +0200, Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca> said:

>> For other readers who might have a clue or who might want to get one, I >> direct folks to EWD 898:

>> "The major attraction of the modern elixirs is that they relieve their 
>> consumers from the obligation of being precise by presenting an interface 
>> too fuzzy to be precise in: by suppressing the symptoms of impotence they 
>> create an illusion of power."

>> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html

>> I am convinced that most OO proponents have been dipping heavily into the 
>> purple koolaid. They almost universally predicate everything they say or 
>> do on meaningless nonsense.

> A great paper. I love the bit about "complexity sells". I wonder,
> between the two of us, which one of us was selling complexity when I said
> that the database was (in the abstract) a bucket of bits, and you were
> talking about relational calculus.

> EWD is indirectly one of the fathers of OO. His name is on a book named
> "Structured Programming". In that book Dahl and Hoare describe Simula 67,
> arguably the first OOPL. They talked about how they stumbled upon the
> notion of objects by moving the stack frame of block-structured function
> from the stack to the heap.

This is just bollocks.
And not even corroborated by what Nygaard and Dahl have written themselves about the origins of Simula, or people who have researched the history of Simula (Jan Holmevik etc) . ***

Simula had objects from day 1, long before the NCC ran into the trap that basing their language on Algol-60 sprung.

If you wish to refute this claim, please quote the *exact text* from your sources that show how the NCC "stumbled upon" objects.

Otherwise <politely>cease and desist</politely> ...

  • Nygaard, Dahl - The development of the Simula programming languages Jan Holmevik - Compiling Simula

Steven Perryman Received on Tue Jun 13 2006 - 12:24:00 CEST

Original text of this message