Engineering(,) A Path to Science: "I don't want to die in a language I can't understand"
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Richard P. "Dick" Gabriel overcame a hardscrabble, working-class upbringing in the dreadfully industrialized and famously polluted Merrimack Valley of eastern Massachusetts to become one of the few genuine Renaissance men to emerge from the OO milieu: scholar, scientist, poet, performance artist, entrepreneur, musician, essayist, and yes, hacker...
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Interesting general point - not sure on the specifics
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Paul Beckford
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1...
To be fair to Gilad and Cook, the criticisms made of the CLOS approach is that you need to know all the Mixins in the hierarchy and how they will be linearised to use the approach reliably. So perhaps it is a modular approach, but it comes with an extensive cognitive load and it does break encapsuation. You need to fully understand the workings of all of the "the system" bits to use it.
The point about khunian paradigm shifts and incommensurebility is well made however. Who is to judge? Without extensive hands-on experience with these differing approaches who can say which is more reliable or not? To some degree it is subjective.
Unlike the physical sciences we have no external world to test our hypothesis against. Software creation happens in the mind and what is an effective approach for one person may prove a nightmare for another. Cognitive bias reins supreme!
You can see this with the recent adoption of dynamic languages. With static language programmers having to gradually overcoming their initial bias.
Btw. Modern day Mixins in a language like Ruby break encapsulation too, so perhaps Richard has a point :)
Great content InfoQ. More of this please!!
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