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by cchooper
6021 days ago
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If object-orientation means X then why don't people just call it X? If object-orientation is polymorphism then how come many polymorphic languages aren't object-oriented? At the very most, object-orientation is a particular mechanism for achieving a particular kind of polymorphism (namely ad-hoc object-based polymorphism). At most. Given the vagueness of the term, it could not even be that. |
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After reading the above article, one could argue that if the definition of object oriented programming is flexible enough, clojure fits it. But we hit a philosophical problem. If clojure is object oriented because it can do all the stuff that oo languages can do, then oop becomes a meaningless metaphor, just a name for a set of common sense ideas. Oop NEEDS to be defined in terms of traditional object systems(with classes and methods and stuff like that) in order to make sense as a paradigm. If you define oop as "a general metaphor in which everything is an object and objects interact with each other via message passing" you can implement it in a variety of ways, all of which would be object oriented.
Simply put, if you don't have the concrete mechanics, the name you had for the result doesn't make sense anymore. Wow, i knew oop was a vaguely defined term, but i didn't know just how fragile its definition was until i started writing this comment.