Re: Explain "take"
Re: Explain "take"
- Subject: Re: Explain "take"
- From: Kai Christiansen <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 23:34:33 -0700
A few interesting things in this thread.
"take" is used rather than "set" specifically and intentionally to
indicate that there is a level of indirection and unknown as to where
the receiving object will actually "store" (that is, "set") the value.
"takeValueForKey" may result in the value stored in an instance
variable, processed by a method, associated with a key in a dictionary
or possibly raising an exception because the receiving object does not
ultimately know how to "take" the value at all. The dynamic
introspection (reflection) used to determine the method and the
resulting flexibility it gives to the implementation called for
something more abstract than "set", hence, the term "take".
The suggestion that WO pre-dates the "OO revolution" and that the
naming might simply be "pre-standard" is, as Bill points, most
uninformed. Not to be petty but simply to share some history and the
fact that naming conventions and even techniques like "key/value
coding" suggest a strong maturity and sophistication that is very much
in step with real OO history, in the midst of or even after the
"revolution", depending on which revolution you are talking about.
I tend to think of the OO revolution as occuring roughly from the mid
80's to the mid 90's, though the development of OO theory and technique
was well underway in the 70's. The chief points of this revolution
relate to the work at Xerox Parc culminating in the publication of
SmallTalk 80 (the late 80's), the development of Objective-C, C++ and
NextStep (eventually including EOF) (late 80's) and a number of
important OO theory and practice bibles in the early 90's (e.g. Grady,
Booch, The Patterns Book, etc.). Then came WebObjects and the Java
white papers, very close to each other in the mid to later 90's. The
point is that WebObjects appeared well within a strong on-going OO
revolution, even a stable tradition, already benefiting from at least a
strong decade of theory, practice and real technology.
I think Bill is correctly responding negatively to the notion that Java
and its technologies might be somehow considered the revolution or even
revolutionary when in fact much of importance in the true historical OO
revolution well precedes them. Indeed, it has sometimes been quite
frustrating to see how much OO history the Java world has seemed to
overlook. In some cases, Java's approach is the odd-man out,
overlooking conventions and standards that came well before it. That
said, it is certainly true that Java has inspired a kind of OO populist
revolution, but here we are talking about a pattern of adoption and de
facto standardization, not necessarily technological evolution much
less revolution.
My $.02
Kai Christiansen
Founder and Artistic Director
earsense, digital music productions
email: email@hidden
web: http://www.earsense.org
phone: 415.647.9776
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