Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On Sat, 23 Nov 2024 01:08:16 +0000, Pancho wrote:

On 11/23/24 00:44, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 22 Nov 2024 23:07:19 +0000, Pancho wrote:
 

I learnt Smalltalk before I learnt C.

 
Smalltalk is an interesting language. But I think it’s considered a
little too unconventional these days ...
 
Does it do multiple inheritance? I can’t remember.

 
No, not that I remember. Classes, Metaclasses, Single inheritance, very
clean. I think Smalltalk was more a teaching tool rather than anything
people used commercially. It was early enough in my development that OO
concepts were like a first language to me. Perhaps if I had had a solid
coding background in something like C before being introduced to OO, I
would think differently.

A person's experience is definitely a factor. My first language was
FORTRAN IV although I never did much with it. As microcontrollers started
to appear in industrial applications I mostly worked wiht assembly or C,
viewing C very much as an abstraction of assembly.

The Boston branch of the IEEE Computer Society was quite active and I
recall discussions of 'C with Classes' in the early '80s that eventually
became C++.

I think C++ was a premature birth. Stroustrup's first and second editions
used objects sparingly compared to what many of the popular texts did when
trying to illustrate inheritance, polymorphism, and so forth. The STL and
Standard Library were years in the future so you had companies like
Microsoft coming up with MFC. Then there was Stroustrup's little quip
about C++ making it difficult to shoot yourself in the foot but when you
did you blew your whole leg off.

Esri used C++ for their Arc Objects API so I used C++ but it never became
my favorite language and the C++ part was mostly manipulating the objects
rather than overall structure. I use C# and Python so I don't dislike OO
when used sparingly. I might even like C++ these days although I have no
call to use it. When our department moved I looked through my dusty C++
reference books from 25 years ago and realized they are museum relics.