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Switching to OCaml bois (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 5 months ago (16 children)

The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said "Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?" Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, "Foolish pupil - objects are merely a poor man's closures."

Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell, intent on studying closures. He carefully read the entire "Lambda: The Ultimate..." series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system. He learned much, and looked forward to informing his master of his progress.

On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by saying "Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand that objects are truly a poor man's closures." Qc Na responded by hitting Anton with his stick, saying "When will you learn? Closures are a poor man's object." At that moment, Anton became enlightened.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (15 children)

Can someone please enlighten me on what makes inheritance, polymorphism, an operator overloading so bad? I use the all regularly, and have yet to experience the foot cannons I have heard so much about.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Because an object is good at representing a noun, not a verb, and when expressing logical flows and concepts, despite what Java will tell you, not everything is in fact, a noun.

I.e. in OOP languages that do not support functional programming as first class (like Java), you end up with a ton of overhead and unnecessary complications and objects named like generatorFactoryServiceCreatorFactory because the language forces you to creat a noun (object) to take an action rather than just create a verb (function) and pass that around.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This makes sense to me, thanks! I primarily use Python, C++ and some Fortran, so my typical programs / libraries aren't really "pure" OOP in that sense.

What I write is mostly various mathematical models, so as a rule of thumb, I'll write a class to represent some model, which holds the model parameters and methods to operate on them. If I write generic functions (root solver, integration algorithm, etc.) those won't be classes, because why would they be?

It sounds to me like the issue here arises more from an "everything is a nail" type of problem than anything else.

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