Thursday, December 27, 2012

Ask not what an object is, but...


I can barely remember the days when objects were seen like a new, shiny, promising technology. Today, objects are often positioned between mainstream and retro, while the functional paradigm is enjoying an interesting renaissance. Still, in the last few months I stumbled on a couple of blog posts asking the quintessential question, reminiscent of those dark old days: “what is an object?”

The most recent (September 2012) is mostly a pointer to a stripped-down definition provided by Brian Marick: “It’s a clump of name->value mappings, some functions that take such clumps as their first arguments, and a dispatch function that decides which function the programmer meant to call”. Well, honestly, this is more about a specific implementation of objects, with a rather poor fit, for instance, with the C++ implementation. It makes sense when you’re describing a way to implement objects (which is what Marick did) but it’s not a particularly far-reaching definition.

The slightly older one (July 2012) is much more ambitious and comprehensive. Cook aims to provide a “modern” definition of objects, unrestricted by specific languages and implementations. It’s an interesting post indeed, and I suggest that you take some time reading it, but in the end, it’s still very much about the mechanics of objects ("An object is a first-class, dynamically dispatched behavior").

Although it may seem ok from a language design perspective, defining objects through their mechanics leaves a vacuum in our collective knowledge: how do we design a proper object-oriented system?