in reply to Perl is NOT OO and neither is JAVA
in thread What is it about perl that makes perl so cool?

When we say a language "is OO", we use that as shorthand for "there is a way of easily accessing polymorphism, abstraction, and inheritance". You are splitting hairs along a non-normal crease to redefine that statement.

Sure, you can do non-OO stuff with an "OO language".

Sure, you can do OO stuff with a "non OO language".

But your definition doesn't help distinguish the languages which make you fight against the grain for OO. So it's a pretty useless definition for most of us.

Fine to do this in the privacy of your own cube, but posting a headline like "Perl is not OO" will get you nailed pretty bad in this community, and does no justice to those who walk away saying "Oh, I heard Perl is not OO, but Java definitely is...". Now you've done us all an injustice.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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Re: Re: Perl is NOT OO but neither is Java
by zigster (Hermit) on Dec 04, 2000 at 21:32 UTC

    I am aware of what is ment by the statement, however what I was saying was that I get anoyed when such statements are used to place one language over another.

    I think it is useful to be able to catagorise languages, so that the appropriate language is used in a given environment, however I am unhappy with the fact that a language is often seen as inferior because it does not fall into a particular catagory, especitally when such catagories are not directly appropriate to a language itself. You yourself made the point that java is not a pure OO language (I had always considered it to be, I am still thinking about your idea). The catagorisation that is often made are made not to help in evaluation but to put down languages and programmers who use those languages (it was used in that very context in the node you replied to) It is in this context I object.

    The title was a little provocative, however I think the subject matter of the node is also provoative. I have updated the subject so it better reflects the content. I was not meaning to be offensive or cause any injustices just vent an long held opinion.

    --

    Zigster

[reply]
      Right, if you go back to that post, I say that Perl, Java, and C++ are all "hybrid-OO", to distinguish them from Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ruby, and (I think) Scheme which are all "pure-OO". But if asked of any of those are "OO", I'd say yes. I was only rallying against the (incorrect) meme of "Everything in Java is an Object! It's all OO!". Because that is wrong.

      -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[reply]

        Do you not think however that such classifications should not be used to create a top 10 of languages? OO is in the vogue atm however I really dont like to reject a language because it is not OO. I there are more pressing issues. As I have said in other posts atm I am coding java stuff for web, java was chosen becuase it is OO despite the fact that IMHO perl would be more apropriate as it is more suited to the problem space.
        --

        Zigster
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