[Declanomous]

Plato would argue that there is such a thing as a chair. In fact, he'd argue there is an ideal of a chair which all chairs strive to achieve. The idea of Platonic Form (and the allegory of the cave) are very relevant to programming because western philosophy has shaped how we view the world, and thus how we program. That being said, I don't think most people I know are familiar with platonic forms, or the allegory of the cave, so perhaps a programming language based around that idea isn't very strong.

In my experience, the vast majority of people who program are doing so not as their full-time job, but out of necessity. This includes scientists, analysts, academics, accountants, etc. If I had to guess, these individuals write way more code as a whole than full-time developers. Adherence to the ideals object-oriented programming is extremely uncommon from what I've seen. I see a lot of copy-and-pasted code in one gigantic class, and a mish-mash of programming styles from wherever they stole their code from. Testing is completely unknown to them.

I think a lot of these considered harmful discussions are carried along by the impact GOTO Considered Harmful had on the programming world, but I don't think they actually address concerns that affect the vast majority of people writing code. They are of obvious interest to Hacker News readers because people here are trying to maximize their productivity and are extremely tech savvy already, but if you are trying to write a language which minimizes the impact that mistakes make on the world I think you should look at where the vast majority of code is being written. The biggest players already have the knowledge to program effectively, it's about creating ways of coding that make good programming more intuitive, and I don't think OO is the problem there.

[crbelaus]

Thank you very much for mentioning Plato here. I was thinking exactly about this wile reading this paragraph:

> Let us also be clear that classes do not “model the real world”. Objects may or may not model the real world, but classes certainly don’t. Although there are many chairs in the real world, there is no “chair class” in the real world.