Re:The Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft (2017)
by TeMPOraL on Monday December 11, 2023 @03:04PM
(#38604783)
You're correct here. I see this as a - still too common[0] - lack of understanding of what classification/ontology/taxonomy is. Categories are made for humans. They're arbitrary and judged only by one thing - are they good enough for the problem being solved. In this sense, reflecting a real-life ontology in your code is usually doing things backwards - it's the code that should invent it's own ontology that's maximally convenient for the problem being solved[1]. Real-life ontologies all have their purposes, but they usually don't include making it easier for you to write software.
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[0] - Is tomato a fruit or a veggie? Is a whale a fish or a mammal? Etc. The answer to that is just "either, none, whatever - it's you who are confusing culinary, economic and genetic taxonomies".
[1] - Which is some combination of code thinking and domain thinking. It's never just purely one of them.
What I mean is: For library developers, inheriting an interface makes some sense. But throwing in an ontology that is meant to mimic human-like classification (esp just for the sake of it) is a disaster in all the code I've seen. There really isn't any reason for a Shape: Circle hierarchy. The better abstraction is around what can be done: a PrintableList<Point>, or whatever.
std:: takes the second approach (Type trait-like interface_-level decisions. There was (for a time) a huge push for the first approach of "is-a" relationships which makes zero sense almost any time.
IMHO ECS is a sane "has-a" relationship which is effectively a redo of "is-a" interface-level interactions, b/c each entity "has-a" list of objects that form it's interface with the system.