"David H. Burns" <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> > 2. What would be so bad about this being true?
> It would be too complex to be usable by ordinary folk (i.e. me).

Not if it's done right.

It might be too complex for ordinary folk to make use of its *full power*, but
simply coding a scene should be no tad more difficult than it is ATM.

To the contrary: It might allow programmers to write more sophisticated "macro"
suites and make them much easier to use for ordinary folk.

(All provided POV-Ray gets a custom-tailored language; with any "off-the-shelf"
language I've seen so far, you'd likely be right: It would become unnecessarily
cumbersome.)


I can understand your resentments: When I first came into contact with anything
officially labeled "OOP", I just thought "WTF?!" - that was Borland's "Turbo
Vision" for Turbo Pascal 6. It looked like it made programming absurdly ugly
and complex, and the section on OOP in the manuals started out in a way that
didn't seem to make any sense to me.

Next time I was introduced to OOP, however, I found that I had been using OOP
concepts already, and what was labeled "OOP" were actually just language
features that made it simpler to implement them, and more-or-less useful
libraries making use of these.

As for the ugliness, I found that most of it was the particular ugliness of the
Turbo Vision framework - or rather actually Borland's idea of how they should
be used - and had nothing to do with the language's OOP extensions in general,
and the residual ugliness was due to these extensions having been designed into
an already-existing language.

Another reason for people experiencing OOP as particularly complex is that many
people encounter it in the context of graphical user interfaces and stuff like
that (a good deal of Turbo Vision, too, was dedicated to windowing user
interfaces, though they were text-based back then); often the high complexity
of the user interfaces is then wrongly associated with OOP in general.


BTW, a work colleague of mine, who *started* his programming carreer with OOP,
was struck with horror when he first made contact with classical procedural
programming...


The bottom line is this: If the language is designed with care, supporting OOP
will allow "wizards" to write libraries with very elegant interfaces, without
interfering with the ease of general scene coding.

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