[cap-talk] Notes from Butler's 2006 Usenix (was: Re: Butler Lampson's upcoming talk)

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Wed, 2008-04-09 at 19:13 -0700, Jed Donnelley wrote:
> An interesting point he made is that he argued that
> object oriented programming, despite being very
> successful (he seems to be measuring "success" by
> market penetration), has caused any systems with
> a "reasonable amount of modularity" to be "badly
> hurt by OO programming" "because of all this
> 'nonsense' about inheritance and subclassing,
> that 'completely wrecks the modularity of your
> system'."  He argues that OO programming has done
> a "tremendous amount of harm" - despite being
> "successful."

On this point I think that he is absolutely right. OO (in the form
usually taught) confuses modularity for hiding. There are many design
patterns involving subclassing, most of which are *wrong* from both an
interface and a type system point of view.