People coming from Javaville or C#land definitely don't have that kind of abstraction (and yes, the usual rebuttal is that they're procedural, not OO).
Classes are objects in Java. You can even create new classes at runtime in Java or use java.lang.reflect.Proxy to make existing objects implement different interfaces.
I once did this in a class project, including even manually creating the bytecode at runtime. Ironically, it's probably the most understandable and maintainable of the crazy metaclass-style reflection I've done (although that's probably mostly due to the fact that the scope was much more limited: I was only mirroring a set of interfaces into a different namespace to work around some stupid limitation in a different library).
What you see as the Class type in Java, at least, is simply a representation of a class. It can tell you about a class, but it doesn't represent an actual thing you can manipulate, change, or use. I can't add a method to that class, or add a field, or manipulate its instances beyond basic method lookup and dispatch.
In something like Ruby or Smalltalk, a Class is an object. It can be changed live, altered, adapted, cloned, or otherwise used just like another object; and the application will change its behavior accordingly, right there on the spot.
I'd recommend reading up on prototype inheritance, as that is the model generally used in the latter languages.
You’re telling me that class objects in Java are immutable while they’re mutable in Ruby. That’s orthogonal to whether they’re objects.
> I'd recommend reading up on prototype inheritance
Thanks but I’ve already literally got my PhD in metaprogramming in Ruby and object model implementation in Java. Ruby doesn’t use anything like prototype inheritance.
Its more then that... It's not even inmutable, not really. There are some things, like privaCy of access, that can be mutated by manipulating Java class objects.
That said, maybe the difference here is how often the janky metaprogramming of classes interferes with day to day peogramming; a java programmer might have never seen this stuff, moreso then a ruby one?
Yeah, the correction re: prototype inheritance is a good one.
That said, there is a qualitative difference in what we call 'classes' in those two environments, which is part of why I think there's confusion. Class in Java is a fairly different concept than a Class in Smalltalk, Ruby, or JS.
I guess I'm not sure what "object" means in Java, then.
In languages I'm used to, an object is a type of value, and values are things that you can store in (or refer to with) variables.
The only vaguely object-like feature of Java classes I can think of is that you can look up (static) methods/attributes on them with a dot.
Or is there more? You can't call `String.toString()`, so `String` isn't an instance of something that inherits from `Object`. I'm at a bit of a loss here... There obviously exist "class objects", but they're not normally what people refer to when they talk about classes. I'd say Java classes are almost purely lexical constructs (though I could be wrong there -- again, I don't know much about Java...)
How do you tell the difference between an object that is the String class, and an object that represents the String class? If you can call .toString on it, and you can compare it to other classes, and you can call .newInstance, then how is it more of a representation than being the actual thing?
> How do you tell the difference between an object that is the String class, and an object that represents the String class?
Hah, I think "an object that is the String class" begs the question :-). I think that `String.class` is an object because you can do objecty things with it (call methods, assign it to a variable etc) and `String` is not an object because you can't do any of those things with it.
To me they're not the same kind of thing, though they're intimately, inseparably and exclusively related. I personally would say even if
new String()
was just syntactic sugar for
String.class.newInstance()
, and all other "bare" uses of `String` were similarly shorthands for operations on `String.class`, I'd still hesitate to say that `String` itself was an object.
My logic is probably less useful than yours, though. I'd say "`A` is a `class`, but `a` is an instance of `Class`" and in your system where `A` and `a` are "the same thing" there's no difference between being a `class` and being an instance of `Class`. Because the things appear in different namespaces (as you say), and are related one-to-one, we could as well say they are two ways to refer to "the same thing", with different operations possible "depending on the phrasing."
Shrugs, it doesn't come naturally to me, but it's at least a self-consistent system.
In java you have to call the special and awkward .newInstance rather than being able to use standard "new". Whereas in e.g. Python I can equally well do
>>> str("foo")
'foo'
>>> x = str
>>> x("foo")
'foo'
and the "builtin" str and "userspace" x are equally first-class.
I once did this in a class project, including even manually creating the bytecode at runtime. Ironically, it's probably the most understandable and maintainable of the crazy metaclass-style reflection I've done (although that's probably mostly due to the fact that the scope was much more limited: I was only mirroring a set of interfaces into a different namespace to work around some stupid limitation in a different library).