With immutable objects, aren't you just left with syntactic sugar around structs and functions? I'm picturing CLOS, which is undoubtedly an OO system but lacks 100% of what you use objects for. Are there languages which let you use dot-syntax for "methods" which just wrap normal functions?
With immutable objects, aren't you just left with syntactic sugar around structs and functions?
Yeah I've gone down this thought experiment. Conclusion I came to is that while you could view it that way, there's something powerful about Just Having One Thing, not structs + functions. It's almost a mindset shift as well, like you're requesting the object to do something and don't care how.
Are there languages which let you use dot-syntax for "methods" which just wrap normal functions?
> It's almost a mindset shift as well, like you're requesting the object to do something and don't care how.
I definitely see what you mean, a lot of FP encourages very general abstractions rather than something domain specific. That being said, I think Elixir has a pretty good handle on using functions as sort of black-box interfaces you can change later. Not sure if that's a language thing or a culture thing though.
> Yeah, Dlang has that.
Ooo, that's really nice. Super simple but a definite improvement to readability. Reminds me of |> in Elixir (or ~> in Clojure), particularly the chaining part. It clicks differently though, and definitely makes things readable for many programmers. Now that I'm writing this out, doesn't Rust have something like this? Like functions strapped right to a struct?
At that point you're left with two benefits:
1) Organizing your codebase so that it is easy to find which functions operate on which data
2) Controlling access to those methods on the programming language level. I.E, TankerService is the only class with Tanker instances and therefore the only part of the code with access to those methods.
Nothing! I mean I personally just use defstruct unless I want inheritance, but that's certainly not because CLOS lacks anything. I meant "you" as in the person I responded to, who wants immutable data structures with tightly coupled functions. It's because CLOS is among the most object oriented systems I know of that I used it as an example; there seem to be some basically orthogonal traits which nonetheless wind up highly correlated, and CLOS is the purest OO you can get this side of Smalltalk while looking different from what you see in Java or whatever.
