Re: objects and forth

Dear David J. Goehrig,

Thank you for your thoughtful and effective reply.  Well a lot of what
you
said came from a higher level of functioning than I am at in terms of 
programming, it was still clear and understandable.  I'm grateful to
anyone
who exposes me to something that I don't know but that I can come to
know.

I need to spend some more time digesting your comments and playing them
out
in manifest ways so I better understand and remember the proposals you
made.

One last question: what are you doing with Forth?  You mentioned in a
prior
post that you had a lot of ARM dev. kits around -- how did that come
about
if you don't mind me saying?  I was sorry to hear that you don't find
ARM to
be well suited to Forth.  It is my ultimate goal (desire? -- dream?) to
be 
able to thoughtfully program in Forth for smart phones.  

My regards.

On Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:59:51 -0500, "David J. Goehrig"
<[email protected]> said:
> On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 04:06:14PM -0700, [email protected] wrote:
> > "However, as a model for factoring code or designing components, it is
> > horrible."
> > 
> > Could you elaborate on that point a bit?
> 
> Certainly.  Quick point of reference, my formal training heavily
> influences my view of this. Having been a Classicist in a former life,
> I've studied more human languages than most programmers have programming
> languages.  And when it come to programming, I've used about 16
> programming languages in production over the years.
> 
> The meaning of any word in any language is entirely dependent on context.
>  In a language like Forth, that context is the order in which that word
> was defined / compiled.  In a language like C, the context that
> determines the meaning is the way in which the program was linked.  And
> in a language like Smalltalk, the meaning of the word depends both on the
> Smalltalk dictionary, the definitions within a class, and any binding in
> the particular BlockContext you're running.
> 
> In all three languages any given WORD can have more than 1 meaning.  The
> problem of determining the meaning of any given word is dependent on the
> context at a particular point in time.  As you increase the amount of
> indirection in the naming of these elements, the basis of object
> orientation, and push the binding to later and later in the process, the
> harder it is to know at the time of reading what a given word means. 
> 
> In Forth with early binding, the context is generally the same at edit,
> compile, and run time.  In a language like C, the context can change
> depending on the scope and link time binding.  A word may have different
> meanings in different function definitions, but also globally depending
> on the libraries linked.  In an OO language like Smalltalk, the context
> is only really defined at runtime, and much to the dismay of many
> Smalltalkers, can often cause immense pain when trying to run older code
> in newer systems.  If you need an example, read the Squeak mailing list
> for several months after they roll out a new release, and lots of old
> software breaks.  There is even a project called "Level Playing Field"
> which normalizes the behavior across the past few major releases.  Much
> of "test driven development" is a response that tries to deal with the
> problems created by this uncertainty.
> 
> From a design point of view, treating linguistic constructs as objects,
> when they are clearly not objects, is simply disingenuous.  Words in any
> programming language are still words.  As such, they are merely symbols
> that stand for things that exist within the experience of the programmer,
> and the context of the program.  Confusing the idiom you use to talk
> about those things with the thing itself, doesn't make for good design;
> merely a muddled understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. 
> Much like Chuck's revelation about the map is not the territory, but is a
> useful representation of it.  Good design recognizes the underlying
> reality, as well as, the limitations of the language we use.
> 
> A friend of mine recently sent me a beauty of a code snippet from a
> project he inherited from a former employee:
> 
> 	public static void setCustomerName(String customer_name) {
> 		customerID = customer_name.toInt();
> 	}
> 
> 	public static int getCustomerName() {
> 		return customerID;
> 	}
> 
> These two accessor methods merely operate on an customer record object
> that has fields customerID and customerName as entities within it. 
> However, the programmer in question, deep in the belly of this beast, was
> at cross purposes with herself, and mixed the concepts of customerName
> and the definition of these accessors.  All of the tests in the test
> suite worked, the application did basically what it was supposed to do,
> but without reading the guts of this seemingly simple object, the meaning
> of the words you read in English are contrary to the definition in the
> code.  This lead to hours of wasted time by later programmers extending
> the code.
> 
> This is not to say that this one example of programming invalidates the
> usefulness of OO.  It merely illuminates how a programer's inability to
> choose the correct words is not solved by using OO techniques.  Finding
> the correct refactoring, and using the correct terminology to convey both
> the purpose and meaning of the code, is independent of the mental model
> you use to think about the relationship between code and data.  That
> mental model, however, can often help to confuse the issue by muddying
> the contextual waters to an extent that the actual meaning at run time
> and the intended meaning at edit time diverge.
> 
> I personally feel that OO design doesn't belong within a program.  If you
> can't envision the complete state of memory at every stage in your code,
> you've outprogramed your head.  Adding additional layers of complexity to
> an already complex problem merely make your program less understandable. 
> Where OO does apply, however, is when you are thinking of the interfaces
> between programs.  Commands you send to a chip over the bus are messages
> in the OO sense.  Commands you send between nodes on a network are
> messages in the OO sense.  But messages you send in a Smalltalk sense,
> are actually just function calls and indirect jumps.  And such a mixed
> metaphor is just disingenuous design.
> 
> 
> 
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