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by rdtsc 3727 days ago
Joe Armstrong's thoughts on how Erlang is more OO than OO languages:

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2009-November/0...

Joe likes to be funny, so don't get upset and confrontational about it.

The central idea is this I think:

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I now believe the following to be central to the notion of OO.

      - Isolated concurrent things
      - Communication through message passing
      - Polymorphism
All the other stuff (inheritance, private/public methods, ....) has nothing to do with OO.

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2 comments
incepted 3727 days ago
FYI, Armstrong thinks that OO sucks [1] so it's weird to see him claim his language is a better OOP language than others.

[1] http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/OO_programming/why_oo_suck...

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rdtsc 3727 days ago
... "Joe likes to be funny" ...

Besides this idea of taking a label away from something you don't like is also a good strategy in general. He obviously doesn't think Erlang should do multiple inheritance. He just points out languages that have been calling themselves OO these years have been impostors.

Also not sure if I mentioned, Joe like to make witty jokes. So don't take it too seriously.

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zzzcpan 3727 days ago
Don't take it seriously. Joe actually admitted, that they only called Erlang OOish because of the OO hype, but Erlang is not an OO language in any way, of course.
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Diederich 3727 days ago
I would gently submit to you that Erlang is pretty close to the definition of 'Object Oriented' as given by the guy who created that phrase.

The commonly held definition of OO has drifted far from that ideal over the years.

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rdtsc 3727 days ago
It is. But at this point it is rather tongue-in-cheek. I certainly wouldn't want Erlang to all of the sudden be called Object Oriented.
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Diederich 3727 days ago
Agreed. That ship has sailed.
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