Yaron Minsky quotes

yaron.md

What I don’t like about object-oriented languages: there are three key ideas that came out of the OO paradigm—one great, one good-but-flawed, one terrible.

• The great idea is abstraction: interfaces.
• The good idea with the wrong default is subtyping. Subtyping is nice—sometimes you want it—but parametric polymorphism is the right default. Think about a function like list.map—you want to have an α list, and then a function that takes α→β. You don’t want to have an object list, and then a function that takes object→object. That’s just wrong.

These mis-features, combined with the verbosity of the languages, make it hard to abstract out simple functions.