Inheritance Considered Harmful

[Ka-Ping Yee]

On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Douglas Crockford wrote:
>
> And then there is E. Mark has chosen as one of his design goals to make E a
> successful and popular language, recognizing that this is often incompatible
> with the goal of making an ideal language. Others have pointed out that C++
> is clearly the worst of the object-oriented languages, and is also clearly
> the most successful and popular. One has to be careful to not draw the
> conclusion that badness==success.

This is an important point that i am very glad has been made.
One can make compromises to improve the popularity of a design,
but that doesn't mean that one should compromise to zealously.

> There are many things I don't like about E. The C-style syntax offends my
> eye. And after a quarter century of experience with word processing and
> hypertext, the representation of program texts is still modeled after paper
> tape.

I find this a very interesting side discussion.  What offends your eye?
What would please it?

Do you, as i, think that an outline-collapsing or somehow hierarchy-aware
editor is long overdue?  If modern text editors would but do one small
thing -- leave the first lines of the enclosing outline levels visible at
the top of the screen while scrolling down -- i would consider it a big
improvement.


!ping