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From: nessus@mit-eddie.UUCP (Doug Alan)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Object oriented (flames at end)
Message-ID: <2229@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 22-Jun-84 05:26:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.2229
Posted: Fri Jun 22 05:26:32 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 23-Jun-84 02:59:55 EDT
References: <289@harvard.ARPA>
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 62

()

>	From: brownell@harvard.ARPA (Dave Brownell)

>	I pray that nobody finds my flaming as offensive as I find
>	the recent flames by 'munyer@harvard'.

I don't find the flaming by Robert Munyer offensive at all.  In fact I
think he is completely right.  He deserves the
Most-Reasonable-Person-Besides-Me-on-the-Net-of-the-Day award.  Your
flaming, on the other hand, I find incredibly bogus.

>	I was flaming away one afternoon, and said something omniscient
>	like "programming languages are designed to express ideas".

>	My professor stopped me on that one, and said that this was a
>	very serious misconception.  "Programming languages," quoth he,
>	"are ways of telling the computer WHAT TO DO."  It seemed at the
>	time to be a very minor point, but it's grown on me with time.

You were both wrong.  Programming languages are both to express ideas
AND to tell the computer what to do.  Any programming language that
ignores either one of these is seriously deficient.

>	You can write programs in C and your computer will be able to
>	perform.  You can't do that with a SCHEME program, or a T
>	program, or a LISP program, or a PROLOG program.  The latter
>	languages are not for use in production software.  They're too
>	expensive now to use in any serious fashion outside of research
>	environments.

That's not true at all.  It just takes a bit of work to do an efficient
implementation, but it's worth the work.  It is fairly easy to do a
proof by example.  Programs written in MacLisp on a Decsystem-20 run
faster than programs written in Algol.  Lisp Machine Lisp: a simple
program to calculate 1000 factorial only takes a second to run.  CLU
(which is object-oriented with the exception that there is no run-time
type polymorphism in case to you "object-oriented" means the Smalltalk
notion) on a Decsystem-20 and on Berkely Unix generates excellent code:
TED, written in CLU, is faster than CCA Emacs which is written in C.

With computer hardware becoming cheaper all the time and with programs
constatntly becoming larger and more complicated, the cost of developing
and maintaining programs will soon be much more of a concern than the
cost of the hardware.  Those who do not start using languages that let
them concentrate on the important parts of the problem instead of making
them worry about details that the computer should be worrying about and
that adequately support modularity through data abstraction, etc. are
soon going to be left behind in the dust.

>	Show me an operating system written in LISP that will support a
>	hundred users, and I'll beat a path to your door.

Who cares.  Mainframes are dinosaurs.  Personal computers and
distributed computing are the future.
-- 
				-Doug Alan
				 mit-eddie!nessus
				 Nessus@MIT-MC

				"What does 'I' mean"?