What was so urgent about getting out this half-baked thought out that the dude couldn't have waited to write something coherent?
If all you're doing is calling methods on objects with no supertypes or private members, then yeah, you could accomplish the same thing by convention. But once you start layering on more functionality in your object system, the number of way you code encode this functionality starts to explode. Everybody ends up doing things their own way, and there's no consistency or compatibility. Sound familiar? It should because it's C.
Sincere question for you: Why does it bother you so much that someone wrote something about something on the web (as hinted by your opening sentence)? Why should we care that the thought is half-baked? Does it rob you of precious space on the internets?
Sometimes, we just want to use the medium to share thoughts with people, there's no cause to be annoyed or even condescending like that, it makes for a horrible atmosphere where no one will want to engage in public discourse.
Fair point. Maybe I was too harsh. I do believe that people should be able to work out their ideas publicly. And perhaps it's not the author's fault that it ended up on HN.
But the again, if you visit the blog now, the piece reads:
> Update: this post was the product of an exhausted mind, and as such it misused terms, wasn’t well backed-up, and was generally incoherent. I’m withdrawing it until such time as I can articulate these ideas a little more competently.
And I agree with that. Avdi can be a great layman-oriented writer, he has a knack for vulgarizing the cryptic, that article was not an example of that. It was rushed, obviously. My point was about something else though, which we seem to agree on.
If all you're doing is calling methods on objects with no supertypes or private members, then yeah, you could accomplish the same thing by convention. But once you start layering on more functionality in your object system, the number of way you code encode this functionality starts to explode. Everybody ends up doing things their own way, and there's no consistency or compatibility. Sound familiar? It should because it's C.