We dont need no Ooooo-Orientation – 4

The Grandeur of The Absolute

From the time – probably millenia ago – when humans first learnt to think ahead of their animal neighbours, we've been able to make certain statements that (presumably) animals can never conceive – abstract generalities.

So for example, a baby calf can recognize its mother cow with a greater unerring precision than a human baby's, yet when the human baby grows up, it can make distinctions out of the reach of our bovine brethren: eg

• my mother vs motherhood
• motherhood vs love
• cheap love poetry vs hi-class love poetry
• etc

In short, humans are very comfortable

dealing with abstractions as though they were concrete.

Now I have a conjecture, viz. that grand generalities have some hormonal trigger for making us feel elated (a grande-generality-pheromone maybe?) so that statements like

1. Nothing in the universe can go faster than the speed of light
2. Every pair of bodies in the universe attract each other according to a trivial-to-state mathematical law irrespective of their distance or relative size
3. Anything that can be computed by any computer whatever (invented or yet to be invented) can be computed by a Turing machine

create a certain tickling feel-good that a 'normal' (non-general) statement like say: My tea has less sugar does not produce.

We dont need no Ooooo-Orientation – 3

In my earlier posts Ive discussed some context around why OO has been one of the more dismal failures in the history of IT/CS.
Here I talk of the error in thinking 'inheritance'.
And this gives the philosophical separation between those drawn to OOP and those not.

Before I come to the meat of the matter – why OO sucks – it would be good in all fairness, to deal with the

Very few successes of OOP

We don't need no Ooooo-Orientation – 2

Philosophical Underpinnings of OO

In the case of OO, we find a good deal of…

No philosophy

We don't need no philosophy (we are techies!) ¹

Naive philosophy

Isn't it obvious what an object is? Just a(ny) thing? ²

We don't need no Ooooo-Orientation – 1

When I was younger, I believed that OO was THE (or at least one important) solution to programming problems.  Over years Ive come to see that OO works in some cases and fails badly in many others. So I intend to blog on and off about my reservations with OO. I'll start off with touching on…

Problems with OO Terminology