Re: docs (OE,Phix) // ? benefits of OOP but simpler
- Posted by petelomax Dec 17, 2016
- 1623 views
One other thing I want to say is that (IMO) object orientation was devised in an era preceding such concepts as unit testing, refactoring, and fail fast development, and also largely (totally?) driven by an absolute fear and terror of introducing bugs.
To be fair, between the 60s and early 90s, covering oo from inception to widespread adoption, debugging was often a fairly nasty business.1
It seems that OpenEuphoria/Phix have, quite naturally and intuitively, the encapsulation necessary to prevent a simple edit from breaking some other completely unrelated part of the system, but perhaps more importantly, addressed the core problem: make debugging easier2, rather than jump though all the convoluted hoops of the object orientated paradigm in the vain hope of avoiding it altogether.
In contrast to the dreaded core dump, OpenEuphoria/Phix programs produce a human-readable ex.err file that should contain everything needed (except constants, which are unnecessary 99 out of 100 times, but would not be difficult to add).
Several more modern languages (but not C++) have admittedly greatly improved on the core dump, some even (gasp) show source code line numbers3.
Obviously adding bugs is in no sense a good idea, but it should not be so horrific, and so costly, that you not only impose draconian limits4 on what can be edited, but you force all programmers to completely change their way of thinking.
Pete
1 I could certainly tell you tales of inter-module jumps and variable updates in MicroCobol, and the time(days) they took to fix.
2 As a compiler developer, I see a pretty sharp divide between debugging the low-level backend (in assembly), and normal user code (in Phix).
3 Source code line numbers in runtime errors would have been very rare indeed, at the time of the initial widespread adoption of OOP.
4 In a roundabout manner by enforcing an object orientated paradigm
