Post 1505116 by feonixrift@hackers.town
(DIR) More posts by feonixrift@hackers.town
(DIR) Post #1494043 by natecull@mastodon.social
2018-11-26T05:06:45Z
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A possible slogan for the OOP wars:"Data reuse is more important than code reuse"ie a big problem with OOP is that once data is packaged together with behaviour into a class, it's very hard to reuse that data in ways unexpected by the original class developerworse, "not being able to get the actual data" (encapsulation) is a deliberate OOP design goal, so it is unlikely that you will be able to get your data out of an OOP system intact. Unless you store it in parallel in a non-OOP system.
(DIR) Post #1494044 by natecull@mastodon.social
2018-11-26T05:10:12Z
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in cases where data reuse ISN'T more important than code reuse, of course, encapsulation starts to work in your favour, not against you.But these kind of systems tend to be ones where one entity (company, developer) 'owns' both the code and the data together. And bundles them all up into an 'application'. Where the data may not even be stored on your computer, because that's exactly the sort of thing that encapsulation enables.Increasingly, I am not comfortable with these kinds of systems.
(DIR) Post #1494045 by natecull@mastodon.social
2018-11-26T05:11:54Z
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I think I want to de-encapsulate all the data on my desktop? pull it out of all the little sealed non-user-serviceable app silos and into one big meaty data soup?At least I think that's what I want. It seems like it's a thing I want. I may be mistaken, but I think I want this.And that's where OOP and I seem to want irreducibly opposed things.
(DIR) Post #1494046 by 0x3F@cybre.space
2018-11-26T05:15:32Z
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@natecull i want this too. i try as much as possible to use free tools to collect data about mt life so that they can be exported into beautiful data soup of my life from which i can do/learn/make cool things. i track lots of my life already and using this data is of keen interest to me
(DIR) Post #1494806 by uranther@cybre.space
2018-11-26T06:10:19Z
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@natecull same. It's a lot of work, but I will slowly divorce myself from the tech tyrants.
(DIR) Post #1496816 by natecull@mastodon.social
2018-11-26T08:05:57Z
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@uranther I guess my point is not just about tech tyrants but about how the currently understood Industry Best Practice theory of programming seems to have led us in that direction.I don't want to throw away everything good that OOP gave us, but it's super weird how it was originally intended by Alan Kay as a tool of personal information freedom and it somehow became... not that.I want to understand what happened. It wasn't just 'capitalism'. Something deeper, more theoretical was wrong.
(DIR) Post #1504897 by natecull@mastodon.social
2018-11-26T08:11:52Z
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@uranther Whatever went wrong, it was at least partially wrong with Smalltalk, completely wrong with C++, very wrong with the Apple Macintosh and possibly also wrong with the Xerox Alto. It was less wrong with Hypercard and even VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Mitch Kapor spent the rest of his career trying to capture that magical thing that 1-2-3 almost became, but even he couldn't - whatever it was went all Enterprisey and turned into Lotus Notes instead, which was Very Big Wrong.
(DIR) Post #1504898 by natecull@mastodon.social
2018-11-26T08:16:23Z
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@uranther I almost suspect that the wrongness begins with the idea of 'Program' and proceeds to get wronger with 'Application Program'.These make sense in a corporate context. Applications can be treated like Tools and can be Managed and Licensed like staplers and photocopies.But in a personal computer.... we should have progressed way, way, past the idea of Program by the 1980s. We should have had something fine-grained *like* Objects, but, where you can always get the data out.
(DIR) Post #1504899 by natecull@mastodon.social
2018-11-26T08:21:25Z
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@uranther The idea of Encapsulation always bugged me, even in the 1980s. Something about it felt Very Wrong. That feeling has never gone away.Encapsulation assumes that an object does not belong to the holder of an object. You have a reference to an object, but you don't own it. It's not 'yours'. You have no right to it. The object is owned by The System.That's where it goes wrong, I think. It's a corporate-military mindset where you need workers to not have access to what they're using.
(DIR) Post #1504932 by uranther@cybre.space
2018-11-26T15:04:15Z
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@natecull After I stopped thinking about OOP in the Java sense and more in the Erlang sense, it started making a helluva lot more sense.
(DIR) Post #1505113 by mvz@mastodon.social
2018-11-26T09:35:44Z
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@natecull @uranther I've always interpreted it as objects being owned by themselves, like free humans. My employer may have a reference to me, but doesn't own me.
(DIR) Post #1505114 by natecull@mastodon.social
2018-11-26T09:48:22Z
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@mvz @uranther that's correct for sentient beings, but an object is literally a machine doing work for you - it's owned by *someone*, and if not you, then by someone who may not have your interests.
(DIR) Post #1505115 by mvz@mastodon.social
2018-11-26T09:56:28Z
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@natecull @uranther I was thinking more about the relation between objects holding references to each other. At that level, each is in some sense a free agent.As a user/programmer, I agree you should have full godlike control of all objects. As soon as OO mechanisms protect objects from the programmer's intentions instead of just from other objects, that's wrong.
(DIR) Post #1505116 by feonixrift@hackers.town
2018-11-26T15:11:37Z
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@mvz @natecull @uranther But as a programmer, I express my intentions through objects.
(DIR) Post #1511457 by mvz@mastodon.social
2018-11-26T20:35:28Z
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@feonixrift @natecull @uranther But I also have (given the right OO language) power to change objects to expose their innards.