Programming language failings [was Re: strangest systems I've sent email from]

[Josh Dersch]

On 4/29/16 6:02 PM, Ian S. King wrote:
> I would actually argue that C++, Java and C# are not object-oriented
> languages.  They are languages with syntax that supports object-oriented
> programming - note that the original C++ was a preprocessor for a C
> compiler.

I'll disagree with this on behalf of C# and Java.  (C++ I agree with; 
the OO portions of C++ are very weak.  Then there are the 
metaprogramming facilities which make me wish maybe Strostrup had played 
with Lisp a bit more...)

C# and Java provide real objects, and real reflective capabilities. 
They're built on top of a stack-oriented virtual machine runtime (and 
JIT compilation) that was explicitly designed to support objects as 
first-class entities.  With reflection, one can find out at runtime what 
methods and fields an object exposes, iterate over them, invoke methods, 
and use that metadata programmatically for all manner of useful things.  
Further, C# and Java's objects provide real encapsulation and real 
run-time safety -- private data is really private, you can't poke at 
random memory (*).  They're not as pure of an OO language as Smalltalk 
is and they're not nearly as flexible, but few languages are :).

- Josh

(*) well, you can in C# (unsure about Java) but you have to explicitly 
state that you're doing something unsafe when you do it. It's handy to 
have available but is rarely needed.