Banana quote

About OOP: You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle

photo credit: daily mail

I think the lack of reusability comes in object-oriented languages, not functional languages. Because the problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.

If you have referentially transparent code, if you have pure functions — all the data comes in its input arguments and everything goes out and leave no state behind — it’s incredibly reusable.

— Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, on software reusability. Source: Coders at Work.

But

Sending a message to an actor is entirely free of side effects such as those in the message mechanisms of the current SMALL TALK machine of Alan Kay and the port mechanism of Krutat and Balzer.

— Carl Hewitt (et al.) author of Actor model. Source: A Universal Modular ACTOR Formalism for Artificial Intelligence

The actor model is one of the basic ideas behind Erlang [citation required]. SmallTalk is first OOP language, (or second if you count Simula). Alan Kay coined term OOP. I saw a paper where Carl Hewitt explicitly stated that Actor model was inspired by SmallTalk, but I can not find it at the moment.

See also: