Re: What databases have taught me

From: Bruno Desthuilliers <onurb_at_xiludom.gro>
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2006 15:20:21 +0200
Message-ID: <449d3c16$0$854$626a54ce@news.free.fr>

frebe73_at_gmail.com wrote:
>>Quite possible - I use Python instead of Smalltalk, but it does have all
>>this (ie, the somewhat functional parts) too, and that's a great part of
>>what make it so usable IMHO. Python is OO almost all the way down (no
>>'primitive' types, functions and classes are objects too etc), but while
>>you can't avoid *using* objects when programming in Python, nothing
>>forces you to actually use the class statement.

> 
> 
> I agree that Python is an excellt language, OO is availible but nothing
> forces you to use it.

Well... When it comes to more advanced tricks, Python's closures and lambdas are a bit to0 weak, so you need to go for OO constructs instead. But really, at this level, OO (à la Python/Ruby etc) and closures are somewhat interchangeable...

> 

>>And objects are in no way tightly coupled to their classes - it's
>>perfectly legal to add/delete/replace attributes (including methods) on
>>a per-object basis,, to dynamically modify a class, to dynamically
>>create classes at runtime, or even to dynamically change the class of an
>>object (which can be tricky and happens to be of restricted practical
>>use, but still can be handy).

> 
> 
> Or use JavaScript, no classes, only objects. And objects are nothing
> else but a map.

Well, a little bit more than a map FWIW. But wrt/ object model, there are great similarities between Javascript and Python (amongst other, Python objects are mostly maps too - even when they don't directly expose the map interface -). Now I do find Python somewhat clearer and less tricky than Javascript (but I may be biased by 7+ years of having fun with Python).

-- 
bruno desthuilliers
python -c "print '@'.join(['.'.join([w[::-1] for w in p.split('.')]) for
p in 'onurb_at_xiludom.gro'.split('@')])"

Received on Sat Jun 24 2006 - 08:20:21 CDT