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OOPSLA 08

I went over the OOPSLA'08 program, and these two items caught my eye:
(1) Constrained Types for Object-Oriented Languages
(2) Whiteoak: Introducing Structural Typing into Java

Looking at the abstracts of these papers (and also other abstracts from the program) brought up a thought that's been wrapping around my mind for sometime: The border between programming paradigms not as clear as it used to be.

Personally, I think this is a good thing. For example, I believe that closures are very useful in OO. My only problem with this line of thought is that I also believe in the beauty of minimalism. A language that borrows constructs from several paradigms will (usually) not be minimal. A conundrum?

By levalex at 2008-10-13 02:31 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 6982 reads

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long ago Smalltalk and closures

For example, I believe that closures are very useful in OO.

Take a look at flow control in Smalltalk.

By Isaac Gouy at Mon, 2008-10-13 05:09 | login or register to post comments

Of course you're absolutely right

It was a bad choice of an example for showing my point regarding the trade off of multi-paradigmicity vs. minimalism.

Here is a better example. Let's take the language from the second paper that I cited. These guys approach goes something like this: "Well, Java is too rigid. So let's take something from dynamically-typed languages and try to combine it with Java's static type checker.". So in Whiteoak they offer structural typing in addition to nominal typing, which means a larger language
(e.g.: http://whiteoak.sourceforge.net/#Whiteoak%20vs.%20Java).

My opinion is that language designers should try to stick to the minimalistic approach.

By levalex at Mon, 2008-10-13 15:08 | login or register to post comments