Functional objects is a presentation by Matthias Felleisen from ECOOP 2004. It was mentioned more than a few times during the past month on the PLT discussion list.
Though it is 74 pages, it doesn’t feel very long; and there is a lot of good content in there. “Java people” will even be happy to see Joshoua Bloch’s quotes scattered liberally about.
Basically it tells a story and makes an argument about how one might go about moving forward with programming, and it does well enough in both regards.
Tag: Object Oriented
Caveats of Object Creation using Closures
At one time or another you have probably heard the claim made that since you can utilize closures while programming in Lisp, there is no need to utilize an object system. That claim is sort of a half-truth. While closures are the language construct that allow you to create objects, they certainly don’t provide you with all of the object oriented programming language features that you would expect. Instead, you need to implement those features yourself.
The question was posed on the PLT discussion list. Some very good points were made about the issues you must address when implementing such an object system yourself, along with a pointer detailing how the issues are addressed in PLT Scheme.