http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=357959


in reply to Implementing a Mixin Class

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As far as I can tell, mixins are yet another artifact of the mistaken belief that modelling The Real WorldTM inevitably leads to better programming constructs.

The OO pioneers, struck by the apparent universality of abstraction and specialisation, and lured on by the taxonomical success of the biologists, had one key success, the creation of a powerful meme; the notion that object oriented methods must be pure in their conception, untainted by so called procedural thought.

This inevitably leads us to the current vogue; that to claim legitimacy, every new OO invention must have an appealing analogy in The Real World.

And mixins, by all accounts having their origin in an icecream store, and being as they are inherently an introduced novelty, are an indication of the extent to which the theorists are willing to embrace the farcical for the sake of conformance with the aforementioned meme of purity.

Mixins allow the would-be purist to program however they damn well please, all the while intoning the virtues of purity with a straight face.

</heresy>