Re: Choice of languages

[Nate Cull <culln xtra co nz>]

> C++ is fairly useless without advanced math - Modern Algebra comes to mind.  
> Without the concepts developed in that couse, C++ is still ultimately a 
> procedural language (at least here at Texas A&M University).  Object 
> orientation is the core of mathematics.  Not many people in computer science 
> have that kind of background (again, at least here at TAMU).  To expect that 
> kind of knowledge is not (IMHO) reasonable in an open source environment.


Huh?

I know nothing of advanced math (show me a vector equation and I'll show you
some squiggly lines), but I understand OOP just fine.  At least, I thought I
did.  Inheritance, binding, message passing... What has any of that stuff got
to do with math?  It's completely unrelated as far as I can see.

Okay, I'm no kernel hacker, and I haven't touched C++, but I'm at least
familiar with Java, Delphi, Jade (fairly new OOP database; you might know it,
might not) and (broken as it is) the Visual Basic object model.  It all
seems pretty simple and straightforward: objects are just data structures with
attitude, they inherit methods and properties, you instantiate them with
x = new Frob(), you go x.method(bar, baz) and test x.property ==
value.  Then you (manually or automatically) delete the instance of x to
reclaim memory.  Properties behave like variables, methods like
functions.  Specific implementation details vary depending on the language,
but that's the core of it.  If you can handle a struct in C, you can handle
a class in C++.  

What dark secret am I missing?

Nate
(who's admittedly way out of practice and really needs to start coding again)
--
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nate cull  culln@xtra.co.nz  http://members.xoom.com/culln
Conspire, subvert, defy, rebel, believe.  Linux.
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