Then again, all these years afterwards...
...I find myself as sad about Bryce as I am about Norm (who also recently popped up in the periphery of my vision).
Bryce was basically wrong about OOP being totally shit, yes; of course he was. But he wasn't totally wrong: OOP as we knew it back then, as we defended it at the time, wasn't necessarily all that great. At least not if the vast consensus of programmers internationally is to be believed, judging from where the debate between functional and object-oriented programming proponents is at today. And the consensus within the OOP community has since then tilted massively away from inheritance -- which AFAICR was what most of us, not just me, tried to enlighten him on the cat's-whiskerness of -- to composition. Not to mention (but I am, aren't I?) the massive conflation between OOP in general and Java's not necessarily bee's-kneesiest implementation thereof that bears the brunt of the blame for souring the aforementioned international programmers' consensus on OOP as a whole. We never got around to explaining to him that they're not the same thing either, did we? (Though I've pretty much given up on getting through to that "IPC" on that one...) And control tables are a pretty darn nifty way of setting up quite a lot of things, I thought so at the time and I still do. (Personally, I'd of course set them up as objects in my code for other objects to link to [or contain, in modern-OOP composition-speak].) He was wrong, but I can't help think he might have been salvageable somehow.
Poor Norm, it seems, hasn't worked since those old days; he's on disability, if I understood correctly. He weighs in on programming discussions now and again... Mainly on subjects like DOS and BASIC. The most recent production coding I've seen him refer to having done is still in VB6. Not that there's anything wrong with that: Heaps of well-designed well-functioning profitable productive apps were built in it. If only he had been able to transition to Delphi, he could then have switched to Free Pascal / Lazarus, and for all we know he might have been productively employed all the time. (Bryce too, BTW: FP/L has, like Delphi, pretty great DB connections and APIs. Those control table apps I mentioned building above, I was totally thinking FP/L is what I'd build them in.)
It's all quite sad, when you think about it too much... Though not so sad I'd want the French Mage back.
Bryce was basically wrong about OOP being totally shit, yes; of course he was. But he wasn't totally wrong: OOP as we knew it back then, as we defended it at the time, wasn't necessarily all that great. At least not if the vast consensus of programmers internationally is to be believed, judging from where the debate between functional and object-oriented programming proponents is at today. And the consensus within the OOP community has since then tilted massively away from inheritance -- which AFAICR was what most of us, not just me, tried to enlighten him on the cat's-whiskerness of -- to composition. Not to mention (but I am, aren't I?) the massive conflation between OOP in general and Java's not necessarily bee's-kneesiest implementation thereof that bears the brunt of the blame for souring the aforementioned international programmers' consensus on OOP as a whole. We never got around to explaining to him that they're not the same thing either, did we? (Though I've pretty much given up on getting through to that "IPC" on that one...) And control tables are a pretty darn nifty way of setting up quite a lot of things, I thought so at the time and I still do. (Personally, I'd of course set them up as objects in my code for other objects to link to [or contain, in modern-OOP composition-speak].) He was wrong, but I can't help think he might have been salvageable somehow.
Poor Norm, it seems, hasn't worked since those old days; he's on disability, if I understood correctly. He weighs in on programming discussions now and again... Mainly on subjects like DOS and BASIC. The most recent production coding I've seen him refer to having done is still in VB6. Not that there's anything wrong with that: Heaps of well-designed well-functioning profitable productive apps were built in it. If only he had been able to transition to Delphi, he could then have switched to Free Pascal / Lazarus, and for all we know he might have been productively employed all the time. (Bryce too, BTW: FP/L has, like Delphi, pretty great DB connections and APIs. Those control table apps I mentioned building above, I was totally thinking FP/L is what I'd build them in.)
It's all quite sad, when you think about it too much... Though not so sad I'd want the French Mage back.
