Warp wrote:
>   Was OOP a "wow, this is a great improvement" at the time it was introduced,
> or was it a gradual shift, which we are now compressing into one big event
> when looking back, 30 years after?

There was a tremendous amount of hype about how this would change software 
development. The biggest hype was with software reuse, and "Software ICs" 
and such. Which is why the hype about inheritance was about, and the fact 
that it didn't work out that way is related to the fact that people aren't 
using nearly as much inheritance as they expected to.

>>>   But otherwise I have seen a trend in programming design to move a bit
>>> more away from pure OOP and more towards dynamic programming. 
> 
>> What do *you* mean by the term "dynamic programming"? I know what I'd mean 
>> by it, but I don't know if your background would make it mean the same thing 
>> as mine does.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming_language
> 

Cool. We agree on the definitions and I think we agree on the idea that 
dynamic programming is becoming a big thing. (Tcl, Python, Ruby, etc are all 
very dynamic in actual usage. Rails is basically one big dynamic programming 
library.)

While I think this is a good trend, I worry what it's going to do for 
maintenance. It makes putting together smaller programs a lot faster, but it 
can be a real headache when you're trying to understand only a piece of the 
code.

(I'm not sure I'd agree functional programming, closures, or continuations 
count as "dynamic programming", but it's a pretty informal definition.)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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