- OOF

"Marc Hawley" <marc_hawley_at_email.msn.com> wrote Re: SFTALK - OOF

> Just to try and incite a discussion, I will take the position that "object
> oriented" programming is just a passing fashion; any gains from "reusing"

A "passing fashion" of the last 12 or more years? (Dick Pountain's book
appeared in 1987).

> object oriented code are more than offset by the overhead of implementing
> and learning this fashion; and effort would be more wisely spent in proper
> factoring and documenting traditional "stack oriented" code.

It can not be denied that "significantly" more effort has been spent in coding
object oriented extensions than to really use them to do anything useful
(in publically visible code that is). Presently MOPS and Win32Forth use
objects. I can not (will not) judge MOPS, but from its newsgroup I get the
impression that MOPS works extremely well for extending and rewriting MOPS.

Win32Forth I know and understand a little better, now that I've done some
extensive WIN32 GUI programming (this is not a compliment :) Like C++, it
works extremely well for simple things, but for slightly more advanced work
I spend much to much time finding ways to beat or trick the compiler, or
spend endless hours "refining" the basics so they accept my latest do-hickey.
It is very tempting to always go straight to the system libs and bypass all
the extra sugar.

> Anyone care to convince me otherwise?

Not me :-)

A little more seriously: OOF *will* take off when somebody writes
extensive non-trivial libraries in or with it. Not when yet another
slick extension comes along.

-marcel

.
Received on Tue Jan 26 1999 - 21:39:29 PST