From tjoccam@crash.cts.com Sun Oct 31 15:49:07 2004 From: Lawrence Dickson To: Oyvind.Teig@autronica.no, occam-com@ukc.ac.uk Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 08:03:01 -0700 Subject: Re:Extreme decomposition questionable? X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92) Message-ID: Oyvind and all, Good! we get down to some real issues. Oyvind Teig says: >Object orientation is here to stay, after all ... This reminds me of what Chesterton (I believe) said, that when anyone claims that some modern feature is "here to stay," it is a sign that it will be pitifully outmoded and dated in a decade or two, i.e. "Gaslamps are here to stay." >We know that the occam concept also is a proven >paradigm. Except the world hasn't embraced it. I disagree with the implication of the word "also", that OO is a proven paradigm. In most of its attempted large scale applications it has been a thumping failure, disguised only by bloated programming budgets and Moore's Law to cover inefficiency. The ONLY thing it seems to be good for is the ARTIFICIAL structure of nested menu/mouse user interfaces (see the reference to Java in my previous note). This serves to PREVENT progress beyond mouse/menu to more advanced computing models (like voice/reply). Actually the world has embraced occam-like structures, insofar as the world has been able to get its hands on them. The explosion of web programming and HTML, accessible to any kid with a browser (including my son Tom) to do valuable creative work, is flat black box programming with point-to-point communication. Note that HTML frames are not OO objects. >Is occam 3 work dead, in the sense >that there is not any purpose of trying? >Why I am saying this, I'm only a user out in >industry. We use everything that works. >But it must be existing. There is one problem, and one problem only: funding. The so-called "free market," with its backward-looking marketing imperatives, has crippled technical creative work, which grows far more freely as a by-product of academic, military or bureaucratic structures! Of course that doesn't solve the problem of how to survive this worldwide ice age. In holes and corners, I guess, as we have been doing; and "a user out in industry" (I'm one too) will have to use occam techniques in non-occam languages in the meantime. Larry Dickson