| ▲ | mananaysiempre 3 days ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Because at the time [the utility of metaclasses] was obvious, Smalltalk was the C++ companion on OS/2 [...]. Maybe? I have to admit I know much more about Smalltalk internals than I ever did about actually architecting programs in it, so I’ll need to read up on that, I guess. If they were trying to sell their environment to the PC programmer demographic, then their marketing was definitely mistargeted, but I never considered the utility was obvious to them rather than the whole thing being an academic exercise. > Aggregation is not inheritance, rather a workaround, using delegation. And it has been always a bit of the pain to [...] avoid writing all the boilerplate by hand. Meh. Yes, the boilerplate is and always had been ass, and it isn’t nice that the somewhat bolted-on nature of the whole thing means most COM classes don’t actually support being aggregated. Yet, ultimately, (single) implementation inheritance amounts to two things: the derived object being able to forward messages to the base one—nothing but message passing needed for that; and the base object being able to send messages to the most derived one—and that’s what pUnkOuter is for. That’s it. SOM’s ability to allocate the whole thing in one gulp is nice, I’d certainly rather have it than not, but it’s not strictly necessary. Related work: America (1987), “Inheritance and subtyping in a parallel object-oriented language”[1] for the original point; Fröhlich (2002), “Inheritance decomposed”[2], for a nice review; and Tcl’s Snit[3] is a nice practical case study of how much you can do with just delegation. > As for WinRT, I used to have it in high regard, until Microsoft management managed to kill everything good that UWP was all about [...]. Can’t say I weep for UWP as such; felt like the smartphonification of the last open computing platform was coming (there’s a reason why Valve got so scared). As for WinRT, I mean, I can’t really feel affection for anything Microsoft releases, not least because Microsoft management definitely doesn’t, but that doesn’t preclude me from appreciating how WinRT expresses seemingly very orthodox (but in reality substantially more dynamic) implementation inheritance in terms of COM aggregation (see link in my previous message). It’s a very nice technical solution that explains how the possibility was there from the very start. [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-47891-4_22 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20060926182435/http://www.cs.jyu... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | twoodfin 3 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
If they were trying to sell their environment to the PC programmer demographic, then their marketing was definitely mistargeted, but I never considered the utility was obvious to them rather than the whole thing being an academic exercise. IBM wasn’t selling to developers. SOM was first and foremost targeting PHB’s, who were on a mission to solve the “software crisis”. We somehow managed to easily escape that one despite no one coming up with a silver bullet solution. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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