[got "a little" off-topic] New paradigms [was: request: python style decorators / aspect orientation]

[Georg Wrede]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Georg Wrede wrote:
>>
>> My exact feelings when OOP was all the rage. People dancing on 
>> rooftops hailing the Object. And all it was, was simply structs, and 
>> functions that pretended to be inside their scope. And folks saying 
>> "saving the objects" when they should have said "writing the data in 
>> some of the fields of some of the struct instances to disk".
> 
> No no no.  You mean "object PERSISTENCE". Sounds a lot fancier. (But 
> also just means "saving some objects", which means just "writing some 
> data from some struts to disk")   :-)

LOL! Right.

>> For a long time I thought I was stupid because "I didn't get it". 
>> Turned out there wasn't anything to "get". Or rather, the thing to get 
>> was the previous sentence.
> 
> Maybe it seems like a big deal if you grew up programming Cobol or 
> something.  I never did really get the OO craze either.  I remember at 
> one point thinking "I must be missing something big here" so I bought 
> and read Timothy Budd's book "Object Oriented Programming".  I got some 
> exposure to SmallTalk from that, which was nice, but other than that it 
> was pretty much a disappointment.

Of course many a consultant, guest lecturer, and downright charlatan 
made a living on it. And they just pretended to be explaining the thing, 
while making sure that folks didn't really see how simple and mundane 
the whole thing was. Grand visions of the future where everything is an 
Object, and where those Objects simply and easily float across computers 
and the net (entirely disregarding different OSs or CPU architectures, 
of course!), gather information and come back giving you info and 
flowers from Jane.

The worst thing was that many books on OO did the same. But I guess 
that's life. You can't sell millions of a book that confesses up front 
that this is something explained in 5 pages, and that there's nothing 
more to it. The more people go into FUW (fear, uncertainty and worship), 
the more money for you.

My bet is that we'll see this all over again. Within a couple of years a 
new paradigm is going to go through the community like a forest fire, 
until again folks get disillusioned and "get" it. Too bad.

Oh, and incidentally, why does quantum computing come to my mind? For 
example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubits has a nice picture and some 
esoteric rambling. I'm not saying it's not for real, but I'd sure be 
amazed if ten years from now we have any real-world practical stuff 
coming out of it. I once read an article on how you could use a glass of 
milk and its quantum states to compute (I forget what, but it was pretty 
damn near the Meaning of Life) amazing and otherwise impossible stuff.

Maybe I should start selling a black box called OD (it's a secret what 
it stands for, but for you guys, if you don't tell, it stands for the 
Oracle of Delphi). Basically it's just the radioactive grain from a 
regular household fire alarm and a coil of copper wire and a magnet. But 
that's a secret, and the whole thing is cast in epoxy to hide it. Then 
there's an earplug socket which you connect to Line In on your computer, 
and with this amazing software driver (/dev/od) you now get a stream of 
fresh entangled qubits.

Dunno what to do with them? Well, for $10k a head, send your programmers 
to a ski resort in the arctic Finland, and we'll enlighten them. We also 
have them sleep with an OD box next to their head, and the combination 
of aurora borealis radiation and the OD box will help them assimilate 
our ahead-of-civilization programming paradigms. And when they come 
back, we'll monitor your company's progress (for an amazingly reasonable 
$100k/week) for the next six months. If no progress is evident, then 
we'll take your middle management for the same treatment (at 
$200k/head). We guarantee results, or your money back. (Except that by 
the time you get disillusioned you can't afford to sue us anymore. And 
if you don't get disillusioned we'll keep at it till you're dry.) Oh, L. 
Ron Hubbard was our first customer, and he sure died rich and with a 
smile on his face.

---

Man, I'm in the wrong business. I should drop D and start making those 
OD boxes.

ps, a hint to those of you who plan on boringly staying with D. Maybe 
you can get rich without leaving D.  Check out the word "Qudit" on the 
same page.

---

Oh, my! Now that I think about this, I have to confess I've already done 
it for real. In the nineties I was working in a consultancy, and we were 
running out of money. After some serious brainstorming we got the fast 
buck idea that we'll gather gullible cubicle programmers from large 
companies and drag them to Lapland for an Extreme Java seminar. I 
organised the thing, got a few lecturers and off we went. The seminar 
was basically about pouring a list of "believe it or not" stuff on them, 
giving them nightly assignments so they don't have time to drink beer or 
sleep, and then giving them a nice certificate of participation to hang 
on their cubicle wall.

Amazing stuff like "you can write an entire web server in Java on a 
single page", "with multithreading you can have several threads visit 
the same object at the same time", and the like. By the time they got 
home they were so confused and in awe, that the first week at work they 
walked around like zombies mumbling incomprehensible stuff to the 
cleaning woman and cafeteria waiters.

The word got around. Six months later we were booked solid. Our 
consultancy had a reputation of being a bunch of larger than life gurus 
on Advanced Topics. We put a clear plastic box three feet across right 
in the middle of the entrance hall to our office. There was a hidden 
blower inside, and pillow feathers floating and dancing around in it. No 
customer ever dared to ask what this contraption was.

Gee, I guess writing my memoirs would be even more fun than the D book.