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Prototype-based programming

Hung Jung Lu hungjunglu at yahoo.com
Wed Dec 10 19:37:15 EST 2003 
Hi,

Description of PBP (Prototype-based programming) can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_based
http://www.dekorte.com/Proto/Chart.html

("Self" is an example of a PBP language:
http://research.sun.com/self/language.html)

The most naive PBP would imply a overwhelming redundancy in namespace
entries. (E.g: all object instances carry bindings for their methods.)
Efficient in time, but not very efficient in space (memory usage). But
I am sure people have looked at lookup-precedence strategies, much
like how Python finds names first in the local, then the global, then
the built-in namespace, or how instance attributes are looked up in
multiple inheritance.

I got looking into PBP because Python starts to look evil when you use
descriptors, metaclasses, etc. And that's not just Python: the
fundamentals of most well-known languages are getting more and more
complicated. The current programming world reminds me of the situation
of the time when RISC came up against CISC. I mean, it's OK for a lot
of additional features to be built on top of the fundamentals, but
nowadays the fundamentals themselves are getting too complicated. Is
it time to take a break and say: "there is gotta be a simpler way!"?
>From the little I read about Haskell it seems that it's possible to
keep the fundamentals clean and do complex things at the same time.
The usage of classes is just weird... it's a concept from the 1970s
and should probably be retired by now. Because you use classes, you
then hit upon metaclasses, (and meta-metaclasses... ad-infinitum), and
also come up with funny "patterns" like Singletons, or define "static"
class attributes. I mean, aren't all these the symptoms that we are
doing something wrong?

regards,

Hung Jung
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