anomaly

[zipher]

On Monday, May 11, 2015 at 9:52:16 AM UTC-5, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> Steven> Python is in production use in hundreds of thousands of
> organisations. It
> Steven> has been heavily used for over twenty years, in everything
> from quick and
> Steven> dirty one line scripts to hundred-thousand LOC applications.
> 
> Mark> Yeah, so was COBOL.  Boom.
> 
> Your point being?

That a billion lines of code doesn't equate to practicality. 

> The software development landscape has changed so much since the days
> when COBOL was king of data processing that its popularity then had
> less to do with some sort of software natural selection than IBM's
> utter domination of the computing landscape in the 1960s. 

Yes, and I would argue that the OOP landscape has changed since the 1990s (with the rise of very high level languages like Python).  The idea of "everything is an object" is an exploration of PL design that I'm claiming is not appropriate for whatever language will create this data ecosystem that I say is as inevitable as a single language being used on the Internet -- it's simply a chaotic attractor that is irresistible for it's sheer utility.

I also bought the idea of everything as an object, it has a unbeatable purity to it.  But we won't ever get to the point were OOP is like the purity of math because the greatest utility of OOP is working with real-world data.  And that real-world puts bounds on the otherwise abstract purity in which a language is theoretically capable.

Mark

P.S. As Mr. Reedy said, please remove pydev from the To: line.  This is the proper general rule when a discussion goes into abstractions, rather than practicality of development.