Posted by Rick DeNatale
Fri, 15 Jun 2007 20:27:00 GMT
A recent thread on ruby-core which touches on the issues of subclassing
prompts me to tell another war story.
Back in the late-1980s to early 1990s, the software industry was starting to warm to the possibilities of object-orientation.
I’d gotten to be seen as one of the experts on OO inside IBM so I found myself
in a series of interesting meetings, but inside IBM and with other
companies.
That’s how I found myself at the headquarters of
a well-known company in the Seattle area
which at that time was one of IBM’s major partners.
This company was the major supplier of IBM’s operating systems
for personal computers. I don’t want to give too many hints, so I’ll give a
pseudonym to the CEO, let’s just call him “Gill Bates”, and I’ll refer to the
company as “BigSoftware” or “BS” for short.
Read more...
Posted in war_stories | Tags fragilecode, frameworks, inheritance, som | 2 comments
Posted by Rick DeNatale
Mon, 09 Oct 2006 20:07:00 GMT
I’ve been working on a little tool to peek behind the curtain and see a bit of what’s going on behind the scenes in the standard Ruby implementation (i.e ‘ruby’ as opposed to ‘Ruby’)
While doing this I was looking at the code which ruby runs when you include a module in a class or another module. I noticed that ruby 1.8 was going to some pains not to move the proxy for an included module in the inheritance chain.
To verify what my eyes seemed to be telling me, I wrote a silly little test program which created a module with one method, and several classes.
This test verified my reading of the 1.8 code. I then tried the same test using the latest ruby 1.9 and found that module mixin semantics have changed.
Read on
Read more...
Posted in ruby | Tags changesinruby1.9, inheritance, mixins, semantics | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Rick DeNatale
Thu, 05 Oct 2006 15:48:00 GMT
Recently, a certain “gentle-reader” questioned my statement in my “mini-memoir” that Simula lacked classes and inheritance.
I stand by my guns. Simula (now known as Simula I) had neither. These were introduced by Simula-67 about five years later. It was Simula rather than Simula-67 which was one of the influences on Alan Kay’s early conception of Smalltalk.
For more details, see my reply to “gentle reader” in the comments to my mini-bio article.
Posted in smalltalk | Tags class, inheritance, OO, simula | no comments | no trackbacks
