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Re: Lucent Technologies & Sun Microsystems

"Kirill V. Kouzmitchev" <kvk@ludd.hr.lucent.com> writes:

> We had a short seminar on Inferno/Dis/Limbo here and I asked why OO
> ideas did not make their way into Inferno. The guy said that Rob Pike
> didn't like OO for certain technical reasons. I was even promised some
> references, but never received them. :( If anybody on this list knows
> of any technical papers written by Rob Pike or other Inferno people on
> this subject would you be so kind as to direct me to them. Semi-technical
> would do, too. :) Any nonflammable comments are also welcome.

Can't refer you to a paper offhand, but look up papers on
component-based programming. Anecdotal experience suggests that for a
large, non-trivial system, OO's main claim to fame: inheritance,
hinders rather than promotes code reuse. People end up subclassing
stuff all the time, leading to a zillion subclasses of a base class. A
more useful facility is C++ template like solution which is really a
module that can be applied to any type. This is the only real "OO"
feature that contributes to productivity which Limbo lacks. All the
other useful properties of OO such as encapsulation, data abstraction
etc. are available in Limbo in a much more efficient package than more
traditionally OO languages.

Maybe one of the developers can comment more authoritatively on why
Limbo is not OO in the traditional sense.

Regards,
Rajappa
-- 
Rajappa Iyer <rsi@lucent.com>		#include <std_disclaimer.h>
	They also surf who only stand on the waves.