Brad Cox: when OOP was about “Software-ICs” and micro-transactions

Re:Brad Cox: when OOP was about “Software-ICs” and micro-tra... by discreteevent on Friday December 20, 2019 @11:52AM (#21845480)

He references the Byte magazine Smalltalk issue. There was another issue much later that looked at why objects failed but actually they didn't. They succeeded but they weren't called objects. They were called Visual Basic controls/components. These were a runaway success. VB despite it's limitations enabled a massive amount of software to be written quickly and easily mainly through re-using commercial components.

But the components were completely encapsulated. Black box, no source code, no inheritance. You could argue the same for services today. Services are software ICs, you can call them objects it whatever you like but they achieve Brad Cox's objective, which is all that matters. (It's just a pity that people think that a service/component has to run in a separate process always, unlike VB)

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Re:Brad Cox: when OOP was about “Software-ICs” and micro-tra... by chadcmulligan on Friday December 20, 2019 @03:58PM (#21847338)

This was the book that defined components https://smile.amazon.com/Component-Software-Beyond-Object-Or... At the time components were going to be the next level above objects - they were the black box that contained a lot of objects and provided a nice programmer interface. Unfortunately the ideas seem to have disappeared, Delphi is an even better example of a component model than VB was imho.

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Re:Brad Cox: when OOP was about “Software-ICs” and micro-tra... by r00fus on Friday December 20, 2019 @12:22PM (#21845724)

I think the concept of software "parts" (similar to the auto industry - many of the components are made by 3rd parties) is only tangentially related to object oriented programming.

There were always APIs but they're still parts with an exposed interface - now just distributed over the Internet "as a service".

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Re:Brad Cox: when OOP was about “Software-ICs” and micro-tra... by imglorp on Friday December 20, 2019 @02:21PM (#21846690)

I think we have succeeded at software IC's beyond our wildest dreams at the time: standard, third party components with mostly understood behaviors, documents, and catalogs to obtain them.

Almost everything except C has web loadable modules and online docs (analogous to IC data sheets in retrospect!) at this point, whether it's Perl's CPAN (going back to 1995) or Gems or MVN or whatever through obvious L-Pad disasters and now containers and various Hubs.

edit. What we didn't dream of when the Byte Smalltalk issue came out (should NOT have tossed mine :-) was the implications of networked module repos. Add one or two lines of code and the system goes out and gets a standard module and wires it in for you. This was not on the menu for people shopping for 74xx at Radio Shack and Digikey.

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