Re: Article about GNU Guile and GOOPS

[Jan Wedekind <jan@wedesoft.de>]

On Tue, 4 Mar 2014, Thompson, David wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 7:57 AM, Jan Wedekind <jan@wedesoft.de> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>   I have written a small blog post about object-oriented programming with
>> GNU Guile and GOOPS [1]. Having used the Ruby programming language for some
>> time, I am quite spoiled when it comes to objects ;)
>>   It took me a while to figure out defining constructors and dynamic
>> instantiation of OO primitives. I hope it'll save somebody else some time
>> one day.
>>   Any comments and suggestions are welcome.
>>
>> Regards
>> Jan
>>
>> [1] http://wedesoft.de/oop-with-goops.html
>
> Hi Jan,
>
> I think it's a nice little introduction to GOOPS.
>
> I want to discuss this particular point from the post, because it is
> shared by many other people: "... one thing I don't like about Scheme
> is that there are different function names for each type of arguments.
> E.g. adding numbers is done with +, adding lists is done with append,
> and adding strings is done with string-append."
>
> Having spent many years now working with object oriented programming
> languages, I hold the opposite opinion.  I think it's awkward to have
> a single '+' operator for all sorts of different operations on many
> different types.  Adding numbers is different than concatenating
> strings or lists and using the same symbol for them leads to
> confusion.  Look at JavaScript for all of the crazy things that happen
> when you add together different types of data: The expression 1 +
> "foo" returns "1foo"!  [] + {} returns "[object Object]"! WTF?  Ruby
> tends to be a bit more sane in this regard, but I think the point
> still stands that operator overloading leads to confusion and strange
> behavior.
>
> WDYT?
>
> - Dave
>
>
Hi,
   I agree, I wouldn't define 1+"foo" or []+{} (and I haven't done so in my 
article). I guess you have the "WAT" talk [2] at "Destroy all Software" 
in mind ;)
   I think that GOOPS makes sense because without being able to extend '+',
user-defined numeric classes (e.g. hypercomplex numbers) always would be 
second class citizens compared to Guile's integers, floating point 
numbers, and complex numbers.
   Anyway, I need to collect some experience with this in Scheme myself. 
But I hope it will work out well.

Regards
Jan

[2] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat