[Haskell-cafe] I miss OO

[Peter Verswyvelen]

Nice.

It would be fantastic to have a little practical real-world challenge
(like building a simple music system, or a simple multi-channel sound
mixer), and work this out in an imperative language, an
object-oriented language, a functional language, and maybe other
languages too, like logic languages or constraint languages (does the
latter exist?)

When OO is about constructing a "machine" and talking about objects,
and FP is about making little algebraic languages, what would C or
Pascal be like? In these languages, you don't think about objects, but
you don't think about an algebra either? It's been a very long time
since I worked with these languages, but as far as I recall, I started
thinking about data structures and procedures operating on these data
structures, which sounds a look like making ADTs and
functions/operations on these... So this sounds odd, because it would
mean that C and Pascal are in a sense closer to FP than OO is?

Also Luke Palmer talked a couple of times about "co-algebraic"
approaches, but not being a computer scientist, I never really
understood what that meant ("just reverse all the arrows"?)

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 3:49 PM, Gregg Reynolds <dev at mobileink.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 6:44 AM, Stephen Tetley
> <stephen.tetley at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2009/11/26 Gregg Reynolds <dev at mobileink.com>:
>>
>>> Modeling musical stuff could provide an excellent illustration of the
>>> difference between OO and the Haskell way; it's the difference between
>>> metaphysical engineering and constructive mathematics.
>>
>>
>> Hmm, Stephen Travis Pope's SmOKe - a design that has been the basis of
>> various state-of-the-art Smalltalk music systems - seems pretty
>> concrete to me rather than metaphysical.
>>
>> http://heaveneverywhere.com/stp/PostScript/icmc.94.mode.pdf
>>
>
> Looks interesting, but what I was trying to get at - ``metaphysical
> engineering'' just popped into my head and sounded kinda cool so I
> went with it - is that these are two radically different ways of
> thinking about what we're doing when we write programs.
>
> For example, Pope talks about music in terms of properties, but then
> says "[t]hese properties may be music-specific _objects_ (such as
> pitches or spatial positions)..." (emphasis added).  This is standard
> OO-speak; there's nothing wrong with it, the point is just that the
> domain of interest is viewed as a collection of ``objects'' and their
> behaviors, where ``object'' is the word we use for lack of a better
> term to refer to things that exist - hence metaphysics.  Are there
> _really_ any objects involved, especially where properties are
> concerned?  Not for me, though others may differ.  In any case, the
> overall picture is that programs are combinations of such objects, so
> the program is viewed as the description of a kind of machine - hence
> engineering.  In order to describe music, the programmer describes a
> machine.
>
> By contrast, a ``purely functional'' approach (I prefer ``algebraic''
> as more accurate or at least more revealing) might construe such
> properties in terms of  types and operations on values of the types,
> which capture the notion of property directly without implicating
> objects in any way.  A music library would be viewed in terms of a
> language (algebra), with customized names for domain-specific types
> and operations, that the programmer can use to describe music instead
> of describing a machine that produces music.  Which makes the
> programmer a litterateur rather than a constructor of machines, among
> other things.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Gregg
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