Re:If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?
by ElevenLathe on Friday April 12, 2024 @03:50PM
(#40016927)
I used to be an OO hater until I started playing with Smalltalk. In particular, I worked through the Pharo MOOC (https://mooc.pharo.org/), which teaches you exactly this: designing the hierarchy IS designing the control flow of the program.
That said, Smalltalky hierarchies are a nightmare in most other languages because another key part of the Smalltalk env is the tooling -- staying inside a running system and being able to edit code from within the debugger is absolutely great and keeps you in a flow state much better than any other workflow I've been exposed to (including Lisp + Paredit + SLIME). The result is that editing class hierarchies in blub-y OO languages is usually a massive pain in the ass, while doing it in Pharo or a similar Smalltalk env is fun and painless. This is why you can't practically write Smalltalkly in Python/C#/Java/etc. even if on paper they have all or almost all of the same features.
That said, Smalltalky hierarchies are a nightmare in most other languages because another key part of the Smalltalk env is the tooling -- staying inside a running system and being able to edit code from within the debugger is absolutely great and keeps you in a flow state much better than any other workflow I've been exposed to (including Lisp + Paredit + SLIME). The result is that editing class hierarchies in blub-y OO languages is usually a massive pain in the ass, while doing it in Pharo or a similar Smalltalk env is fun and painless. This is why you can't practically write Smalltalkly in Python/C#/Java/etc. even if on paper they have all or almost all of the same features.