Coders at Work - Looking Back at Djikstra's Support of OOP

[Andy Daykin]

I know that Djikstra wasn't featured in the book, but Knuth defended the functional paradigm from his criticisms. Djikstra was a proponent of OOP, but so far there is little evidence that OOP has been more effective than OOP. Studies in software engineering have shown that bugs in OOP programs are harder to track down, and OOP programs have more bugs.

Do any of the other people in your book comment on what style of programming they prefer and more importantly why they use it? In particular do any of them get into OOP vs. functional?

[Peter Seibel]

Well, I interviewed Simon Peyton Jones (co-inventor of Haskell) and Joe Armstrong (inventor of Erlang) who obviously have things to say about functional programming. There's a good quote from Armstrong from the book that's made it away around the around the net involving a gorilla and a banana and a jungle as a description of OO programming. On the other side Joshua Bloch, big-time Java programmer, is obviously an advocate of OO programming though we didn't get too much into OO vs. functional. And then Dan Ingalls and L Peter Deutsch obviously had stuff to say about Smalltalk's contribution to OO. And lots of folks had things to say (as I've blogged about recently) about C++.