[Fwd: Re: [SLUG] arrays]

[Jonathan Worthington]

"Stephen O'Neill" <soneill84 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Jonathan Worthington wrote:
>> Perl can do object orientation too.  I'd also point out that for a lot of 
>> tasks you don't need OOP - it gets in the way more than it helps at 
>> times.
> I totally agree, I certainly wasn't advocating in this instance.
>
> Speaking personally I find for large systems OOP helps, but for 'scripts' 
> it doesn't. Though as OOP is largely all I've ever been taught/used I find 
> it easier to grasp.
Sure.  Speaking personally on my part, things are better now, but during the 
90's there seemed to be a lot of OOP hype where it seemed a lot of people 
thought OOP was the answer to everything.  OOP *is* a good paradigm and it 
does fit a lot of problems.  Some large systems still don't always fit it 
too well though.  I guess compilers, one of my areas of interest, is one 
good example where OOP doesn't help all that much.  More and more 
multi-paradigm languages are appearing.  Take a look at C#.  C# 1.0 was 
pretty much all about OOP, but if you wanted to do procedural it didn't get 
in your way *too* much.  C# 2.0 added generic programming.  C# 3.0 (not 
about yet for production use, but the spec is available to read) really 
pulls away though, adding in features to support functional and declarative 
styles of programming.

> I struggled many months ago to write a small application using GTK, but 
> given that I had little experience with C/C++ I found it a tough 
> transition and found I moved my interest onto a line of lesser resistance 
> before long.
C and C++ give you Stuff To Worry About (like memory management).  Frankly, 
I really feel that C and C++ are the wrong tool for the job when it comes to 
writing your everyday GUI apps, unless you need some kinda high performance 
or something.  You're better with a language that does memory management 
stuff for you.  Maybe like C# (Mono project + GTK bindings) if you want a 
more static language or Perl or PHP or Python which also have GTK bindings. 
It feels to me that for some reason the FOSS community seem to have some 
fascination with writing such apps in C still.

>> I guess I'd count as a Perl "expert", and I'm actually going to be in 
>> Scarborough for most of December and at the start of January.  I'll 
>> happily give a Perl scripting talk if anyone wants one (and hopefully 
>> drop in to a meeting anyway).
> Hurrah! Our December meeting is Monday the 12th; The January one is 
> supposedly Tuesday 3rd, however I suspect it will end up being Monday 9th.
Aha.  I'm going to see friends in London and will be away on the 12th, but 
Monday 9th Jan seems pretty much do-able.  I'll make a note of it.  If 
there's agreement on me talking at that meeting, how long for and is there a 
computer projector or anything (very vaguely remember something about a room 
at a school, but that was a long time ago and I'm afraid I haven't been 
following all that closely).

>> I think I'll be in Scarborough more pernamently again after next summer 
>> too...
> Good, well, I hope it's good. I don't think I have a face for your name
Photos (not just of me - also of pretty places): 
http://www.jwcs.net/~jonathan/

> but I seem to recall that you have your own business
Yup, pretty small though.

> and have bags of experience writing Linux applications?
>
Hmmm.  Kinda.  I've built a lot of web apps using the LAMP platform.  At the 
moment one of my free time projects involves working on the runtime engine 
for Perl 6 (aka Parrot), which runs on Linux amongst many other things. 
Part of my work there has been Win32 support, but when I'm implementing more 
general features (recent projects include better debug info and writing the 
Parrot linker) they need to run on a pretty bewildering array of platforms.

Take care,

Jonathan