Perhaps part of the confusion - and you say this in a different way in your little memo - is that the C/C++ folks see OO as a liberation from a world that has nothing resembling a first-class functions, while Lisp folks see OO as a prison since it limits their use of functions/objects to the style of (9.). In that case, the only way OO can be defended is in the same manner as any other game or discipline -- by arguing that by giving something up (e.g. the freedom to throw eggs at your neighbor's house) you gain something that you want (assurance that your neighbor won't put you in jail).

Sum-of-product-of-function pattern - objects are (in effect) restricted to be functions that take as first argument a distinguished method key argument that is drawn from a finite set of simple names.

All you can do is send a message (AYCDISAM) = Actors model - there is no direct manipulation of objects, only communication with (or invocation of) them. The presence of fields in Java violates this.

Parametric polymorphism - functions and data structures that parameterize over arbitrary values (e.g. list of anything). ML and Lisp both have this. Java doesn't quite because of its non-Object types.

Encapsulation - the ability to syntactically hide the implementation of a type. E.g. in C or Pascal you always know whether something is a struct or an array, but in CLU and Java you can hide the difference.

Following Christopher Strachey,[2] parametric polymorphism may be contrasted with ad hoc polymorphism, in which a single polymorphic function can have a number of distinct and potentially heterogeneous implementations depending on the type of argument(s) to which it is applied. Thus, ad hoc polymorphism can generally only support a limited number of such distinct types, since a separate implementation has to be provided for each type.

In programming languages and type theory, parametric polymorphism is a way to make a language more expressive, while still maintaining full static type-safety. Using parametric polymorphism, a function or a data type can be written generically so that it can handle values identically without depending on their type.[1] Such functions and data types are called generic functions and generic datatypes respectively and form the basis of generic programming.

Dynamic dispatch

The considerations which have governed the specification of languages to be taught by the professor of Modern Languages were that the French is the language of general intercourse among nations, and as a depository of human Science is unsurpassed by any other language living or dead: that the Spanish is highly interesting to us, as the language spoken by so great a portion of the inhabitants of our Continents, with whom we shall possibly have great intercourse ere long; and is that also in which is written the greater part of the early history of America.

The considerations which have governed the specification of languages to be taught by the professor of Modern Languages were that the French is the language of general intercourse among nations, and as a depository of human Science is unsurpassed by any other language living or dead: that the Spanish is highly interesting to us, as the language spoken by so great a portion of the inhabitants of our Continents, with whom we shall possibly have great intercourse ere long; and is that also in which is written the greater part of the early history of America.

Transcription is supported in the following languages for MECHANICAL fidelity jobs:

The tender age at which this part of education commences, generaly about the tenth year, would weigh heavily with parents in sending their sons to a school so distant as the Central establishment would be from most of them

a handful in a few major world languages

In my opinion one of the key properties of a scripting language is not to be found in the language itself, but rather the tools that are used to deploy it. Traditionally a script in Perl or Python can just be run, without explicitly invoking a complex compilation and linkage script.

almost all languages are dynamic and involve dynamic typing, even languages like Ocaml and Haskell. Every time your code interprets data and makes choices based on that, you have dynamic typing. The simple fact is that there's no hard and fast distinction between type information and data: constraints on data, such as the format of a stream of text, are type constraints which are beyond the static type system to check, so the checks are done dynamically at run time by your code, and that's dynamic typing!

Learning new programming languages

Up for a Challenge?

Python was created by Guido Van Rossum in the early 90s. It is now one of the most popular languages in existence. I fell in love with Python for its syntactic clarity. It’s basically executable pseudocode.

Full Text Beginning Perl Modern Perl Impatient Perl Extreme Perl Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason Picking Up Perl Perl 5 Internals Practical Mod Perl Perl & LWP

Lisp Quickstart

The goal of this site is to provide a set of materials in support of my Python for Informatics: Exploring Information book to allow you to learn Python on your own. This page serves as an outline of the materials to support the textbook.

The Benjamin Franklin Programming Practice Model

The hard part is teaching the consequences of each choice.

The study of Latin ought, therefore, to follow at no long interval, and soon after to keep pace with the Greek; thus it will happen that when we have begun to attend to both tongues with equal care, neither will impede the other.