33 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2023
    1. But just what is an object? At its simplest, an object has two components: Internal state. This is embodied by variables known only to the object. A variable only visible within the object is called a private variable. As a consequence, it is impossible – if the object decides so – to know the internal state of the object from another object. A repertoire of behaviors. These are the messages an object instance responds to. When the object receives a message it understands, it gets its behavior from a method with that name known by its class or superclass.

      Reductionistic vs other definitions

      Is the annotated paragraph describing what is an object or how is an object? This same criticism is also present in Dave West's Object Thinking.

      Other perspectives:

      Smalltalk's design—and existence—is due to the insight that everything we can describe can be represented by the recursive composition of a single kind of behavioral building block that hides its combination of state and process inside itself and can be dealt with only through the exchange of messages. Philosophically, Smalltalk's objects have much in common with the monads of Leibniz and the notions of 20th century physics and biology. Its way of making objects is quite Platonic in that some of them act as idealizations of concepts—Ideas—from which manifestations can be created. That the Ideas are themselves manifestations (of the Idea-Idea) and that the Idea-Idea is a-kind-of Manifestation-Idea—which is a-kind-of itself, so that the system is completely self-describing— would have been appreciated by Plato as an extremely practical joke.

      —Alan Kay Early History of Smalltalk (1972)

      So objects have something resembling agency, see the actor model.

      OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.

      —Alan Kay Clarification of "object-oriented", email reply to Stefan Ram

      I also like the complementary view that Gerald Sussman teaches on his video lecture 5A that informs chapter 2 and 3 of SICP; objects are a cheap way of modelling the world.

  2. Dec 2022
  3. Aug 2022
    1. 可以基于意图去使用各种协调分布式系统的工具,而不用深入具体工具的实现细节去研究怎么解决的分布式难题

      sicp作者也提过,现代开发是探针式的开发方式,不需要了解那么多细节,只需要知道点api即可

  4. Apr 2020
    1. Applicative order versus normal order According to the description of evaluation given in 1.1.3, the interpreter first evaluates the operator and operands and then applies the resulting procedure to the resulting arguments. This is not the only way to perform evaluation. An alternative evaluation model would not evaluate the operands until their values were needed. Instead it would first substitute operand expressions for parameters until it obtained an expression involving only primitive operators, and would then perform the evaluation.

      Applicative-order and normal-order evaluation sound like synonyms to eager/strict versus _lazy_evaluation strategies respectively, but there are differences:

      The bottom line seems to be that

      • strict/eager = normal order
      • lazy ~= applicative BUT all terms are evaluated at most once
    1. recursion equations

      Does this refer to recurrence relations?

      Not much found for recursion equations, and those seem to suggest the two terms are interchangeable. However: Recurrence vs Recursive

      See wikipedia on recurrence relation also.

    1. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
    1. Each breakthrough in hardware technology leads to more massive programming enterprises, new organizational principles, and an enrichment of abstract models. Every reader should ask himself periodically “Toward what end, toward what end?”—but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.
    2. The source of the exhilaration associated with computer programming is the continual unfolding within the mind and on the computer of mechanisms expressed as programs and the explosion of perception they generate. If art interprets our dreams, the computer executes them in the guise of programs!