[CRConrad]

> Sure it meant they missed out on the collective brain damage that was design patterns and object oriented--but it also meant that it missed out on good things, too.

The "collective brain damage" and other similarly derogatory epithets that OOP regularly gets slammed with is AIUI actually Java "collective brain damage"; it doesn't necessarily apply to all forms of OOP.

[bsder]

Well, there are two levels to this:

1) It was in fact mostly C++ brain damage. "Design Patterns" predates Java by quite a bit.

2) OOP isn't a unified thing. There was a paper way back that mentioned something like two dozen "characteristics" of "OOP". And then proceeded to point out that "Smalltalk" chooses these, C++ chooses those, Java chooses these, and that there was a lot of disjointed-ness between the definitions.

[CRConrad]

Yup. So the vaunted "brain damage of OOP" is more a matter of the "brain damage" of C++'s / Java's choice of which of these traits to implement and call the result "OOP".

(Personally, I largely agree -- and I say that as a fan of a basically very similar OO language, Object Pascal [as seen in Delphi and Free Pascal / Lazarus], which could also be seen as an imperative language with bolted-on inheritable templates of records with method pointers called classes. It just made a slightly different, and better [IMO], choice of exactly which of these traits to implement, and that makes a all the difference to me.)