Tilly perhaps ive missed your point, but you seem to be doing the same thing as merlyn. You are trying to apply OO models from various languages to Perl. OO is a simple idea: the strong association or binding of procedures with the data that they manipulate. Everything else in OO is an extension of this simple concept. Now many languages embraced this idea and as mathematicians (think i)and computer science types often do extended the idea to its logical limits, or beyond in some cases, to see what the implications, pros cons etc of such systems.

But these ideas (prototypes, inheritance, polymorhism, overloading....) are just additional concepts that have been added (or not depending on the language) because of the interests, predilictions and whathaveyou of the various authors and users of the various languages. The fact that they are often useful or desirable features of a language does not mean that they are necessary, much less right.

Im happy that you prefer smalltalks OO model, and even happier that perl provides what is necessary to emulate it. But not because I like the smalltalk model but because I like the perl model, where I can do all kinds of things, only a few of which are considered to be standard OO techniques.

Now as I said, I have come to agree with merlyns point, but not for any of the reasons he provided (which were, to be blunt, crap). You said: The blind repetition of programming patterns that you have not thought about and do not understand. Well Im sorry but to me that is exaclty what merlyns statement about marking people down whenever he saw the construct is. The blind application of a rule of thumb without trying to understand why it was done. For instance I have written a number of GA implementations in perl (unpublished sofar). Now I have a class GA::Entity in my model. This class is used to represent a solution in the GA. When I call GA::Entity->new() it returns a randomly generated solution. When I call $ga_entity->new() it produces a randomly mutated version of $ga_entity, and when I call $ga_entity->new($other_ga_entity) it returns a cross of the two. I thought long and hard if I wanted this type of behaviour and experimented with a number of alternatives before deciding I was happy with this approach. But of course merlyn would mark me down bigtime without considering why I had done it, and what my reasons were. And that my friend is plain and simple Cargo Cult Programming.

Now, Ill grant that if merlyn had said something like "Well, generally I dont think this is a good idea. If I saw this in a code review I would want to see good justification for doing it, and a healthy amount of documentation to explain what is going on" or something to that effect then my attitude would be very different. Also I will grant that if the users of this construct are as you allege unaware of the issues related to it, then indeed it is cargo cult programming as well, but this doesnt change the fact that merlyns comments are too.

I think you might want to reread my sarcastic comment about hungarian. I was trying to come up with the equivelent of a perl guru advocating the use of hungarian in perl.

As for the C/Context point, I dont agree. To me there is little or no difference between someone who has experienced a (different) concept or not experienced the concept at all in a given langauge demanding that a second language behave the same way. That quite possibly is why they are different languages.

Your last sentence is to me the key here, Their opinions might be wrong for Perl, but they at least have an experience base which is somewhat relevant, yes their opinions are relevant but not necessarily correct. And that is exactly what I think of merlyns post. Relevent and wrong.

Yves / DeMerphq
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