Clojure Protocols & expression problem

[Michel Fortin]

On 2010-04-28 21:39:41 -0400, bearophile <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> said:

> Andrei Alexandrescu:
> 
>> Good question. Statistically, I'd say very few people are interested in
>> double dispatch.
> 
> I see. I'd like to know what CLOS (CLisp) users too think about this.
> 
> (Generally if a feature become syntactically clean and nice, and it's 
> written in the manual, surely more people can find the desire to use 
> it. But this is just speculation.)

I think you're correct on that.

I'll point out that categories in Objective-C are used all the time and 
basically solve the same group of problem double dispatch does, but 
also have other uses. I think being able to attach your own extension 
methods to an existing class (methods you can override in subclass, or 
extensions to subclasses) is a much easier concept to grasp than double 
dispatch. The feature being used a lot in the standard library surely 
helps too.


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/