Comment by randrews
15 years ago
I see his point about how everyone rolling their own thing is bad for the Lisp community, but he's got a kind of ridiculous view of C:
"Making Scheme object-oriented is a sophomore homework assignment. On the other hand, adding object orientation to C requires the programming chops of Bjarne Stroustrup."
It really doesn't. You can have a system that uses structs with function pointers, which is how things like Glib work. You can have a compiler that adds special syntax for doing this, which all gets translated into normal C calls; this is how Objective C works. OO is just Not That Hard To Do in any language.
Anyway, Lua is another great example of this curse because there's no module system or standard library to speak of, everyone rolls not only their own object system but their own list functions. The reasons are different though; Lua's design goals are to be a tiny language for embedding, so they sacrifice completeness for being really easy to customize.
Yeah, if you can't implement a basic object system in C, you don't really understand how OOP works anyway.
Also, I definitely agree w/ you about Lua. Great language, but it's so focused on being shape-able into whatever its embedding project needs that the community refuses to settle on conventions for some things. OTOH, it's small & clean enough that running your own fork of it is actually a decent trade-off, whereas doing so with (say) Python would be pretty harsh.
I've been thinking about things I could build that would fix that, but that's sort of how we got into this in the first place. :-)
Yeah. The people who are using Lua primarily in an embedded context (and thus have a lot of dependencies, such as threading & graphic libs, already chosen for them) have VERY different priorities than the people using Lua standalone. It pulls the community in two different (and occasionally opposed) directions, and the Lua team doesn't want to alienate either camp.
(On the balance, though, it's still one of my favorites.)
3 replies →
>You can have a compiler that adds special syntax for doing this
To be fair, C's base syntax is obtuse enough to make any extended C compiler gratuitously difficult. It wouldn't take a genius, but it would take an unreasonable amount of time and pain.
I agree that basic OO is easy, but inheritance (particularly multiple inheritance), virtual functions, RTII, etc. add significant complication.
It's more complication in design than implementation though, and doing it in Lisp instead of C won't help that any. Once you decide what you actually want to write, it's not a whole lot harder to write it in C than Lisp. It's harder, but it's still something that anyone who can do it in Lisp would be comfortable doing in C.
Lua is another great example of this curse because there's no module system or standard library to speak of
I think this, instead of syntax, is the main cause of fragmentation. The more strongly a language community recommends and bundles a module system and a package manager for it, the easier it is to build an ecosystem