On 04.08.2016 08:43, Joel Roth wrote:

> In which language? Whose expectations?
> Probably you never used OO much, or had problems
> that OO is well suited to solving.

I'd guess, he's referring to the imperative OOP, like eg. C++,
Java, etc are doing it (smalltalk etc are quite different) - at
least that's what I'm referring to.

> To say that the ability to apply a method to an
> object offers nothing valuable over a simple subroutine call
> is missing a lot I think.

Well, the actual benefit comes with inheritance. But that also
can be easily done w/ stupid call vectors (okay, a little bit
more typing when having to write constructors on your own).

Generic types (or templates), of course, are a different area.
But when I really need such things, I'd probably go for
functional languages anyways.

> OO has made it possible for me to structure and refactor a
> medium-size codebase that was procedural before. The ideas
> of instantiating and destroying objects are easily made
> explicit in OO. Statements like my $object = $class->new()
> and $object->DESTROY are quite expressive.

What's the big difference to something like that ?

$obj = class_new() and class_destroy($obj)

If you're already here, you can also decide whether you wanna
let the constructor do the allocation or do it on your own
(in case the caller knows the size), so the caller can decide
where to actually put it:

class_init(&inst)
class_fini(&inst)

That's actually the approach done in many C-projects, eg. the
Linux Kernel or Cairo.

> More recently, an
> OO concept called traits (or roles) has made it possible for
> me to reduce classes into smaller blocks of code. Traits can
> be used to avoid multiple inheritance.

hmm, I actually never had a real usecase for that yet ...

> Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
>> ACK. I really wonder what [OO is] actually useful for ...
>
> Well, you mention composition as an alternative to
> inheritance, but isn't that still classes, methods and objects?

Well, depends on whether you call an ADT (IOW: struct w/ some
functions operating on them) an class ... in that case, you'd
have to call the Linux Kernel OOP'ed.


--mtx