Years ago (early 1992), I attached myself to this crazy skunkworks project that was using this weird language called Smalltalk. "Object Oriented" was in its infancy as a "hot" item. High paid consultants. Lots of people laying claim to what this new object religion was all about. This was 5 years before Alan Kay would make the statement "I invented the term 'Object Oriented Programming' and this {Java and C++} is not what I had in mind."Shortly after hooking up with this whacky group with the whacky language, still confused about what the difference was between an instance variable, a class va...

After recently remarking about how I finally "got" functional programming I was asked by one of my millions of twitter followers... ¬_¬ to write up an explanation of a small F# program spoken in terms that fellow O-O programmers would understand. Before I become too entrenched into the functional programming way of thinking, that is, and can't explain it anymore. As a former tutor this is one of the major problems with being able to teach something once you understand it. You've forgotten how not to make sense of the concept and what finally helped you get over the me...

Let me first say that I am a Scala lover and have been a Scala champion for almost 5 years.  I've written books and articles on Scala.  I've worked with dozens of companies that have launched Scala and Lift projects.  I've code reviewed many dozens of Scala projects.I used to think that Scala was easy.  It was, and continues to be, a cure for some of the numerous problems with Java.  From the "stuff that's hard or impossible in Java is simple in Scala," Scala is a very easy language.  Dealing with collections is super easy in Scala.  Isolating business logic ...

My good friend Brent Simmons invokes a historical email from Linus Torvalds, about his disdain for C++C++ is a horrible language. It’s made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it’s much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.Brent affirms his support while paying homage to plain-old C:But I will admit to an enduring love of C. I still think of C not as C but as the language.I loved C. Emphasis on the past-tense. As object-oriented programming concepts became popular, those of us who were programming in C or simi...

David Chisnall takes a look at the two dominant paradigms in object-oriented languages (classes and prototypes) and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each.Two terms are quite often confused when describing programming languages:class-based and object-oriented:Simula was the first class-based language. It provided classes (actually implemented using closures) as a means of encapsulating abstract data types.Smalltalk was the first object-oriented language. It provided a mechanism for decomposing programs into subprograms that ran on a simplified model of a computer an...

PHP's meaning of overloading is different than Java's. In PHP, overloading means that you are able to add object members at runtime, by implementing some of the __magic methods, like __get, __set, __call, __callStatic. You load objects with new members. Overloading in PHP provides means to dynamically "create" properties and methods. These dynamic entities are processed via magic methods one can establish in a class for various action types.Some example:class Foo{    public function __call($method, $args)    {        echo "Called method $method";&n...

Javascript gets a bad rap on the Internet, but there are few languages that are so dynamic, so widespread, and so deeply rooted in our lives as Javascript is. The low barrier of entry leads some people to call it a script kiddie language, others scoff at the concept of a dynamic language while riding their statically typed high horse. You and Javascript just got off on the wrong foot, and now you've made it angry. Here's five reasons why your Javascript code sucks.1. You're not using a namespace.Remember in college when the teacher said you can't use global variables in your homework? Using gl...