Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Would Openacs benefit if it had an object oriented scripting language?

Harish, I'm no OO expert myself, but to the best of my knowledge, smart OO afficionados tend to consider Java and C++ to be fairly poor as object oriented languages go. Counter examples of powerfully object oriented languges might be Smalltalk, the Common Lisp Object System, XOTcl, or Python.

Malte, can you tell us more about how Vienna is using XOTcl, what they found it particularly good or bad for in the OpenACS context, etc.?

Lisp hacker Jonathan Rees (creator of T and Scheme 48) also have some interesting anti-OO thoughts. His take seems to jive with the OO criticisms from Date and the other relational model folks, note - especially that "OO is not well defined." Which doesn't mean that it isn't useful, of course.

Well, that's maybe off topic from what we were discussing here, but close enough and interesting enough that I wanted the excuse to post the link. :)

Roberto, speaking theoretically, if you could wave your magic wand and transform OpenACS from procedural style Tcl code to something OO, but otherwise very similar (XOTcl, perhaps), would the result be better or worse? Why or why not? I don't really know the answer to that myself, as I haven't done any real OOP work.