Re:Brad Cox has died
by prabhatjha on Friday January 22, 2021 @07:12PM
(#25878100)
What a great tribute you have written. When I first found about swizzling through a seasoned iOS dev I was blown away. The swizzling capability in obj-c basically helped create my first startup, InstaOps, a long time back which allowed no code change to instrument an app to capture logs and network performance metrics.
Re:Brad Cox has died
by neverartful on Friday January 22, 2021 @08:23PM
(#25878597)
I second all of these comments. I was on the same team with him (Hi Prabhat, this is Paul D.) and concur that swizzling is a very powerful mechanism. It's definitely a good thing to know about if you're working with Objective-C.
Re:Brad Cox has died
by captainclam on Friday January 22, 2021 @09:02PM
(#25878818)
"I think Alan's idea of OOP was something more fluid, more organic than this."
I've heard a good deal about Alan Kay's dissent of the state of OOP, but I've never seen a concise summary of his vision or the principles that Kay's 'ideal' realization of OOP would adhere to.
Does such a resource exist, written by Kay himself or otherwise? Or do I just need to go play around with Obj C or Smalltalk to really "get it?"
He did an AMA here once:
Here he discusses his thoughts on the term; http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay...
Re:Brad Cox has died
by lostcolony on Friday January 22, 2021 @10:16PM
(#25879249)
But, yes, you really need to play around with one to 'get it'. Or at least, get why the other languages fail to really uphold the goal.
Per the original anecdote, being told "it's all blue!" isn't that impressive when you've seen the spots of blue and shrugged them off as just normal little detours amongst the pink, and can't imagine everything being blue. You have to see it for yourself.
>I've heard a good deal about Alan Kay's dissent of the state of OOP, but I've never seen a concise summary of his vision or the principles that Kay's 'ideal' realization of OOP would adhere to.
Smalltalk 76-like...
>Brad definitely walked on the blue plane. RIP.
Your/Alan's "blue plane" analogy remindeded me of this:
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
In the talk, Alan talks about the ant who lives his life on a single plane of existence, the "Gulley World" or "Reality".
The ant goes to work, he finds stuff to eat, he lives his life in this Gulley World, which is depicted as a pink 2D plane. However some times on this pink plane there are little spots of blue. They represent thoughts that don't belong in the pink plane.
Sometimes those blue spots turn into blue planes, and the ant we are following starts to move along that plane instead of the pink one. Everyone in the pink plane thinks he is wrong. Everyone can see the pink plane, in all its reality. It is not until you walk on the blue plane until you can see "another way".
The metaphor being that we developers built a world where we started to take the general idea of OOP and construct a lot of "reality" around it. A lot of process, a lot of formalization so we could build mechanical systems of gears that slotted together. I think Alan's idea of OOP was something more fluid, more organic than this. The world is messy and we often try to abstract the mess away in these overbearingly weighty and hierarchical programs that everyone agrees is the right way.
I think Objective-C was the most widely used and successful walk on this blue plane. Millions of developers were exposed to the idea of message passing as a form of OOP, which is an astounding accomplishment. It really is a neat language, and I had a lot of fun learning it.
Brad definitely walked on the blue plane. RIP.