Class Browsers vs Static Types (Re: Inefficiency of __getattr__)

[Joachim Durchholz]

Boris * (1+(is->cic)) <borcis at geneva-link.ch> wrote:
>
> - another angle, way to put it : the real canonical OO programming
> situation, that which won OO the market, is the one provided by GUI
> builders; and it was the old timer's definite feeling upon 1st
> contact with GUI-builders powered OO-language IDEs,

The existence of an IDE is far from relevant for the mindshare that OO
enjoys today. Examples:
C++ compilers started as C preprocessors. Yet enough people liked C++ so
that it would be accepted.
Simula predates even emacs modes.

If you're alluding to Smalltalk: you're drawing conclusions from the
exceptional case. AFAIK, in Smalltalk, the IDE design was considered
more important than the language design, while it's definitely the other
way round in more conventional languages. This difference shows:
Smalltalk as a language is simple (to the point of being simplistic),
and the IDE is very standardized and integrated. For more conventional
languages, it's exactly the other way round - whether for better or for
worse, I can't tell (I'm pretty sure that Smalltalkers and Visual Age
users each have their own opinion on this topic).

> that this integration killed the role of
> a classical entity : the source code file - the things we used to have
> listings of.

This is the Smalltalk philosophy, not an OO philosophy.

> Listings felt like the more manifest and explicit form of a
> before then. The change may appear trivial, but in some sense it has
> to do with generalizing the notion of syntax from the case of linear
> text to something sensibly different.

Even in Smalltalk, you still have syntax. Storing source in an IDE
instead of in a file means you get rid of the topmost levels of syntax,
but below it's still the same style of programming.

This change is still important, as makes some stupid mistakes at the top
level impossible. I think that's one of the reasons why IDEs have been
and are being written for Java and C++.

Regards,
Joachim
--
This is not an official statement from my employer or from NICE.