Re: OOP can be simply summed up as 'passing messages to objects'


Daniel Parker wrote:
"topmind" <topmind@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1140995913.415646.322680@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Nobody ever agrees on what OO is. Asking will start a big fight.

That used to be true, but not anymore. In the latest issue of
"Communications of the ACM", in an article entitled "The quarks of
object-oriented development", the author notes that "one reason that
learning OO is so difficult may be that we do not yet thoroughly understand
the fundamental concepts that define the OO approach" and that "several
authors...[have asserted] there is no clear definition of the essence of
OO..[and have] called for the development of a consensus."

So she sets out to "to identify and describe the fundamental concepts, or
quarks, of object-oriented development, and identify how these concepts fit
together into a coherent scheme."

"...material related to OO development published from 1966-2005 was reviewed
using the keyword search `object-oriented development'. A wide variety of
sources (journals, trade magazines, books, and conference proceedings),
viewpoints (computer science, information systems) and emphases
(programming, methodologies, modeling, and databases) were reviewed for the
sampling frame. The analysis consisted of reviewing each source document for
the identification of specific concepts as the OO concepts. For example,
Morris, Speier, and Hoffer list abstraction, attribute, class,
encapsulation, inheritance, message passing, method, object, polymorphism,
and relationships as central OO concepts; whereas Rosson and Alpert list
abstraction, class, encapsulation, information hiding, inheritance,
instance, message passing, method, object, object model, and polymorphism as
the OO concepts. Of the 239 sources reviewed, 88 asserted that a specific
set of concepts characterize the OO approach."

What more could you ask for?

"More" is the last thing we need to settle it :-)

Did the researcher come to any conclusion?

Note that the problem with key-word based research is that even if it
all came down to one word, such as say "encapsulation", even that word
starts fights. Some say it is about protection, and others say its
merey about grouping related things, and others say its both or
neither.


Regards,
Daniel Parker

-T-

.