Buridan's Ass and the decline of Object Orientation

http://asymmetric-payoffs.blogspot.com/2011/11/buridans-ass-and-decline-of-object.html

by steview • 15 years ago

3 2 15 years ago

asymmetric-payoffs.blogspot.com

elimisteve• 15 years ago

I think your analysis would be spot if it weren't for one simple fact: you assume that the best technologies win, and this is clearly not the case.

Ruby and PHP are perhaps the two slowest programming languages ever invented. And yet, they dominate the web.

Did Windows win the desktop wars because it was technically superior to Unix? No. And yet, it still won, and continues to dominate. Even where it's losing ground -- to OS X -- the reasons have little or nothing to do with the tech, but design.

That said, using the right tool/technology/language/framework for the job certainly can be an advantage, and I personally hope to demonstrate the superiority and brilliant simplicity of Go by leveraging its legitimate, inherent advantages as best I can... to build a distributed computing platform... thing. Yeah.

tl;dr -- I think you're wrong, but I hope you're right.

jimwise• 15 years ago

I think you're not considering enough ways in which one technology can be superior to another.

Ruby wins for the web not because it is faster _at executing code_, but because the combination of Ruby and Rails is faster _at iterating new features_; the optimization which has led it to win is performance of programmers, not code.

Likewise, Windows is inferior to Unix as an OS design -- but it is vastly superior to (non-MacOS) Unix in the time it takes to get a semi-technical user from a machine still in the box to a machine which can do the things most users care about (browse the web, edit documents, and so on).

In the long run, which matters more? Machines are getting faster much more quickly than programmers or users are getting smarter...

Buridan's Ass and the decline of Object Orientation

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