Aristo Tacoma { Next was first published in the yoga6d.org/economy.htm column and it's reproduced here because it outlines a general emotional and intellectual background with some force as to why a rethink of all the computing ways was necessary; and so provides a foundational space in mind for understanding the necessity of G15 and G15 YOGA6DORG. Also, this is written fast, and should be read VERY fast, as some might argue that it sets a new standard for the quantity of delicious grammatical errors permissable in one short piece ;) LINKED TO AT norskesites.org/fic3 } ON THE RISE AND FALL OF OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING -- After the collapse of the status of Java, there has been anarchy in the land of objected oriented programming; may it never clear up again! [As of 1::A::2013::4::13 (morning in terms of GMT hours) Author of this yoga6d.org/economy.htm comment can contacted at h-reusch@frisurf.no] As little as a decade ago, programming had many flavours but one flavour was getting more and more to be almost synonymous with programming. As the core subject of higher eduction in programming, with a wide scope of books published on the language each season, and with steadily more fancied projects being proposed, Java by Sun Microsystems came to gather the paradigm of object-oriented programming into one 'government of unity'. If you didn't like Java -- tough -- you probably didn't like programming. I hated it, and learned it, and found it, after spending a considerable time with it, utterly unuseful for any of my purposes in the long run. But even with that attitude, the fact that as of today, Java is simply not having any status at all to speak of, went beyond my antipation. To me and, I know, for many others, it's a sure sign that there's hope for humanity that Java has now fallen and is lying bleeding on the ground, a monster whose had become inflicted with a deadly wound. For some, it's troublesome; and others pretend it's not so -- but it IS so. After the collapse of the proud company Sun Microsystems it was overtaken by a company with an almost even worse reputation -- if such a thing is possible -- than Microsoft, Inc, namely Oracle, Inc, whose main profession is to handle such as air ticket reservations in the Oracle database. Oracle did so probably because right before the collapse of Sun, Java had more and more become equipped with what they saw as a competitive database. Then, by a long series of fabulously status-lowering actions -- such as making Java install spamware on any computer that has it, and trying to wrestle billions of dollars by a meaningless court battle with some other company who has used an open source rebuild of Java in their mobile phone platform -- it reached its climax when the virus defence of Java became so sloppy that no less agent than the White House asked people to switch off Java on their online PC's. So much for Sun and Java being the 'dot' in 'dot com', as their typical advertisement line run pre year 2000. Dot com is fine but Java ain't. And while C++ still exists and still can be used and, for some projects, indeed still are used, it isn't regarded as anything much but ordinary C with a lot of somewhat incoherently-thought additions to provide various forms of quick pathways into a quickly-thought form of classes of objects with inheritance and all that. Python, which was made on the premise of being more to the point with less cluttering around it, has come to be seen more or less like all the other object-oriented languages in use in various mobile phone, tablet computers and personal computers in general -- namely, as way to script menues in a pre-made graphical menu approach. For scripting -- in other words, for programming that aint programming, just a shaping of programs already made with new parameters for sizes and positions and texts and color tones and such, -- object-oriented class-thinking may have something to it. Why not? Though error-prone, and something that easily causes the computer to temporarily collapse due mostly to the fact that an object- oriented language tries to imagine that the computer has many parallell processes while it don't, it has proven to be a fine, okay, boring way to structure something. Indeed, Gnome as file menu handler, built through some such object-oriented script languages, -- and now working just fine in many dominant platforms -- was originally launched under the slogan, "A boring graphical menu system for the adult in you." But that's exactly what an operating system is: it's a mere platform for running the REAL thing, namely programs. It can never, despite the attempts of Microsoft and Apple to portray it as something else, have anything much to contribute with. It's but a protocol for programs to work together of a mere technical kind; and a kind of paint on top of the command lines which remain the only true way to start programs for those who know. And so, with the various object- oriented script languages belonging to such companies as Google, Microsoft, Apple and so on, and with a bundle of open and free object-oriented languages which portray themselves as script or more as the real thing of a programming language, we're back to an anarchy when it comes to what object-oriented programming is all about. Prior to C++, the influence behind it all, was a Norwegian language made in the mid-1960 as an extension to Algol called Simula then Simula-67 (in 1967). The word 'simulation' really says it all: it was made to make some simulations especially for research into behavioural and social sciences easier. The classes were more or less literally the classes we speak of in society, and indeed one of the two who made it also was a prominent labour party politician in Norway, who championed the idea that Norway should stay out of EU. That latter contribution seems at present to stand out as infinitely the best one. The trouble, then, with classes are that reality aint really organised in terms of classes; and the trouble with objects floating about in a parallell computer space is that no computer space is really parallell but rigid and sequential like hell. And unless the language, like C, actually allows the programmer to refer to this rigid sequential space as rigid and sequential, the control slips from the programmer and over to background routines or 'master control modules' built into the various object-oriented programming languages, and when these modules don't work, no mere programmer using that language can fix the problem except by a workaround. And so Java programming at an advanced level is mostly a question of doing advanced workarounds. One must fight with a scheme that was invented to make things easier, but which makes complex programs in praxis ten times more complex. The reason, then, is that the class and object-oriented languages are made without a true relationship to the computer idea. It's rather made out of some abstract vision where the notion of the computer is even more blurred than in the often-crashing 'cloud' ways of doing internet. This has had a certain fun effect: nobody in the big computing industries no longer knows more than a small portion of what goes on inside the computers. The popularity of the rediculous structures of object-oriented programs have made monsters out of the computer software content. So, when Microsoft releases a new version of its platform, it releases a new version of a vast package that is simply so vast that nobody on the planet, and certainly nobody in Microsoft, can anymore understand it all, except in specialised details as a result of spending much time on some modules. But while there are hundreds of thousands of programs that are supposed to work with that platform, they are not really daring to rewrite anything either. The best they can do is to do nothing -- but that's not a way to give bread and butter to their tens of thousands of employees. Instead, they mess it up a little bit and announce, once in a while, 'this is the biggest roll-out ever', hoping that the thin layer of paint will look good and that it won't fall off as quickly. This is the natural consequence of an orientation towards object-oriented programming when combined, as Apple championed by lending of all the ideas of the Xerox Palo Alto Research group, with the notion of providing a graphical platform for starting programs. This messy idea was in turn mimicked by Microsoft and it spread to become the paradigm of messiness that has become the status quo of the computing industry. Meanwhile, the making of programs by individuals and small companies and also bigger companies have gone on, of course. Those who do REAL good programming know that they must try and forget the mess that operating systems have become and stick to a real stable strong language which doesn't put objects in a virtual world without relationship to the genuine computer structure -- and, of course, the variety of algorithmic languages, and assembly machine language, then become their approach. The rest, who just want to modify a little bit of what's already in the computer, script it with or without object-orientation, but it's no longer confused with the notion of genuine programming. ***