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by benfle
2657 days ago
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I don't see those quotes as contradicting Kay's point about data. My interpretation of what Torvalds and Pike are saying is that we should spend time designing our programs to find the right way to think about our problems. And this is done by finding the right data structures and their relationships (architecture) so that the code (algorithms) is minimal. This is very close to what Kay was advocating with object-oriented programming (OOP). The data that Alan Kay wanted to get rid of is what Clojure people calls place-oriented programming (PLOP). Which is funny because they often use PLOP to mean OOP. What Kay meant by "data" is setting and getting values in memory slots (assignment). He realized that moving data around like this did not scale because most of your code will be busy doing those mundane things. This is the "code" and "algorithm" part in Pike's and Torvalds's quotes. Your software is cluttered by code moving things from one place to another because you don't have the right "data structure" or "architecture" or "object design". Unfortunately, a lot of modern OOP languages are PLOP and make it even worse by encouraging developers to create a class for every single piece of data they want to compute with. Calling `setName` on an instance of a Person class is not OOP but the "data" that Kay wanted to get rid off in the first place. So I think they're all talking about very similar things but with slightly different terms. The goal of programming should be to find the point of view that will give us the most leverage to solve our problem. We should spend more time designing our programs to find the right concepts as opposed to start coding as soon as possible with whatever abstractions we're familiar with or that our programming environment makes available. My personal favorite about how to get conceptual efficiency of our software is from David P. Reed's "Get the verbs right". See https://users.cs.duke.edu/~rodger/articles/AlanKay70thpoints... |
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