Re:Alan Kay on the misunderstanding of OOP (1998)
by coldtea on Friday June 24, 2016 @08:43PM
(#11974598)
>I don't really understand this obsession with messages.
We're moving away from it.
On the contrary. We use it more than ever -- only similarly to Greenspun's tenth rule -- in "ad-hoc" and crappier implementations.
What do you think REST microservices are beneath the surface for example? Or AJAX, WebWorkers, SOAP. Etc. The bad parts of messaging without the flexibility (or even the performance of Smalltalk of the 90s) (Incidentally, Erlang/Elixir gets this right, Akka, etc). Or, all the Rabbit, Duck, Donkey MQs, ZeroMQs, pub/sub, event emitters etc out there.
>This is not how we program in the 21st century
That's more of a problem of the 21st century that messages.
>Besides, this idea of message passing is really not that useful for modern programming anyway but a lot of people still have this weird idea that message passing magically solves the problem of data integrity in parallelism. It doesn't. It does nothing to solve it. You can still have deadlocks and you can still have data corruption.
Deadlocks are not related to data integrity, so they're another story. As for "data corruption", messages where values are copied (and thus immutable) are not really prone to it compared to "how we program in the 21st century".
On the contrary. We use it more than ever -- only similarly to Greenspun's tenth rule -- in "ad-hoc" and crappier implementations.
What do you think REST microservices are beneath the surface for example? Or AJAX, WebWorkers, SOAP. Etc. The bad parts of messaging without the flexibility (or even the performance of Smalltalk of the 90s) (Incidentally, Erlang/Elixir gets this right, Akka, etc). Or, all the Rabbit, Duck, Donkey MQs, ZeroMQs, pub/sub, event emitters etc out there.
>This is not how we program in the 21st century
That's more of a problem of the 21st century that messages.
>Besides, this idea of message passing is really not that useful for modern programming anyway but a lot of people still have this weird idea that message passing magically solves the problem of data integrity in parallelism. It doesn't. It does nothing to solve it. You can still have deadlocks and you can still have data corruption.
Deadlocks are not related to data integrity, so they're another story. As for "data corruption", messages where values are copied (and thus immutable) are not really prone to it compared to "how we program in the 21st century".