Re:Extreme decomposition questionable?

[tjoccam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Lawrence Dickson)]

Oyvind and all,

Good! we get down to some real issues. Oyvind Teig says:

>Object orientation is here to stay, after all ...

This reminds me of what Chesterton (I believe) said, that
when anyone claims that some modern feature is "here to
stay," it is a sign that it will be pitifully outmoded
and dated in a decade or two, i.e. "Gaslamps are here to
stay."

>We know that the occam concept also is a proven
>paradigm. Except the world hasn't embraced it.

I disagree with the implication of the word "also", that
OO is a proven paradigm. In most of its attempted large
scale applications it has been a thumping failure,
disguised only by bloated programming budgets and Moore's
Law to cover inefficiency. The ONLY thing it seems to be
good for is the ARTIFICIAL structure of nested menu/mouse
user interfaces (see the reference to Java in my previous
note). This serves to PREVENT progress beyond mouse/menu
to more advanced computing models (like voice/reply).

Actually the world has embraced occam-like structures,
insofar as the world has been able to get its hands on
them. The explosion of web programming and HTML,
accessible to any kid with a browser (including my son
Tom) to do valuable creative work, is flat black box
programming with point-to-point communication. Note
that HTML frames are not OO objects.

>Is occam 3 work dead, in the sense
>that there is not any purpose of trying?
>Why I am saying this, I'm only a user out in
>industry. We use everything that works.
>But it must be existing.

There is one problem, and one problem only: funding. The
so-called "free market," with its backward-looking
marketing imperatives, has crippled technical creative
work, which grows far more freely as a by-product of
academic, military or bureaucratic structures! Of course
that doesn't solve the problem of how to survive this
worldwide ice age. In holes and corners, I guess, as
we have been doing; and "a user out in industry" (I'm
one too) will have to use occam techniques in non-occam
languages in the meantime.

Larry Dickson