Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

Scripting News 2000

[May 20, 2000] Critique of OOSC2 by Bertrand Meyer

I have been doing custom business programming for small and medium projects since the late 1980's. When Object Oriented Programming started popping it's head into the mainstream, I began looking into it to see how it could improve the type of applications that I work on.

Note that this excludes large business frameworks such as SAP, PeopleSoft, etc. I have never built a SAP-clone and probably never will, as with many others in my niche.

I have come to the conclusion that although OO may help in building the fundamental components of business applications, and even the language itself, any minor organizational improvement OO adds to the applications themselves are not justified by the complexity, confusion, and training effort it will likely add to a business-oriented language. In other-words, OO is not a general-purpose software organizational paradigm, and "selling" it as such harms progress in the alternatives.

I have used languages where the GUI, collections handling, and other basic frameworks are built into the language in such a way that OO's benefits would rarely help the language deal with them. It is also my opinion that the language of base framework implementations probably should not be the same as the application's language for the most part. For example, most Visual Basic components are written in C++. Meyer seems to have more of a one-size-fits-all view of languages and paradigms than I do.

For a preview of my opinions and analysis of this situation, may I suggest the following links:

Introduction to OO criticism
The Driver Pattern
Subtype Proliferation Myth
Black Box Wire Bloat
 

Although the stated niche is not representative of all programming tasks, it is still a rather large one and should not be ignored when choosing paradigms.

Here is a quick summary of my criticisms of OOSC2:

1. Meyer tends to build up false or crippled representations of OO's competitors, which distorts OO's alleged comparative advantages.
2. A good many of the patterns that OO improves are not something needed directly by the stated niche, except in rare cases.
3. We have very conflicting views and philosophies on data sharing.

Note that although my writing style has at times been called sarcastic and harsh, please do not confuse the delivery tone with the message.

Also note that I am not against abstraction and generic-ness. I am only saying that OO's brand of these is insufficient for my niche.

[May, 14, 2000] developerWorks Linux Features - Library - Papers Craig McElwee Web developer, Atlantic Mutual Insurance Co. May 2000

This article compares five prominent scripting tools (Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and Java servlets) by applying each to the same six common server-side tasks. You can look at the syntax side-by-side and evaluate how each language handles specific jobs. If you are new to server-side scripting, or if you have used only a few of these languages, you can see what they look like. Even if you already have a favorite, you can see how the other languages stack up in terms of usability, functionality, and code readability.

Assuming your Web site currently serves up dynamic content, how did you pick your scripting language from the numerous open source server-side scripting methodologies available? Did you inherit it or receive it from on high? Or did you methodically look at the pros and cons of each option, weigh them against your site's needs, deadlines, and your own skill set, and choose the one that fit best? If not, read on. You may find a scripting solution that is easier, more powerful, simpler to maintain, or just more fun.

XOTCL - an Object-Oriented Scripting Language Accepted for publication in:
Proceedings of 7th Usenix Tcl/Tk Conference (Tcl2k), Austin, Texas, Feb 14-18, 2000

This paper describes the object-oriented scripting language XOTCL (Extended OTCL), which is a value added replacement of OTCL. OTCL implements dynamic and introspective language support for object-orientation on top of TCL. XOTCL includes the functionality of OTCL but focuses on the construction, management, and adaptation of complex systems. In order to combine the benefits of scripting languages with advanced object-oriented techniques, we extended OTCL in various ways: We developed the filter as a powerful adapation technique and an intuitive means for the instantiation of large program structures. In order to enable objects to access several addition-classes we improved the flexibility of mixin methods by enhancing the object model with per-object mixins. We integrated the object system with the TCL namespace concept to provide nested classes and dynamic object aggregations. Moreover, we introduced assertions and meta-data to improve reliability and self-documentation.

[Feb 09, 2000] Shell Programming

This is a document that covers some issues regarding shell script programming. Note that this page is still under construction. The intension is that is should be possible to use it as a WWW text for "advanced" shell programming, but right now I am just collecting stuff.

Note! I use Bourne shell or derivatives thereof, like BASH. Therefore the scripts contained herein is written for Bourne shell (usually found under /bin/sh), unless said otherwise.

[Jan. 5, 2000] Linux Magazine October 1999 FEATURES Uncultured Perl

Last updated: March 15, 2008