The way this post reads to me is that MI is expensive in dynamic languages, and traits are one of many attempts to address that – that if MI were cheap, we wouldn’t need traits.

But what about the complexity issue? Programming has always evolved in the direction of greater abstraction; the complexity of software systems we build today is orders of magnitude greater than that of the artifacts created by any other engineering discipline. (And unlike other disciplines, you can do repetitive work once only, and then factor it away – so the complexity keeps growing. This is why software will never be industrialised like other engineering disciplines (not that they are industrialised even remotely to the extent the software types always seem to think they are, and anyway, I digress).) Even the simplicity of throwaway scripts is deceptive: you have an OS beneath, and they run inside an interpreter which takes care of memory management and many other menial tasks; and neither the OS (to a large extent) nor the interpreter are written in assembly, so you also need a compiler. The amount of work that has gone into making Perl oneliners simple is quite imposing.

Anyway, I’m rambling. The point is that complexity management is by far the most important aspect of designing programming systems (ie. meta-programming), and to me it seems like your post does not go into this at all. You admit that MI becomes unworkable for the programmer in large hierarchies; I believe that’s a much more salient point than its performance.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re^2: Informal Poll: why aren't you using traits? by Aristotle
in thread Informal Poll: why aren't you using traits? by Ovid

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