[swift-users] Comparing POP to OOP

[Dave Abrahams]

on Sat Mar 05 2016, Jon Hoffman <swift-users-AT-swift.org> wrote:

>> On Feb 25, 2016, at 7:29 PM, Dave Abrahams via swift-users <swift-users at swift.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> on Sun Feb 14 2016, Jon Hoffman <swift-users-AT-swift.org> wrote:
>> 
>
>>> Numerous tutorials that I have seen take a very Object-Oriented
>>> approach to the protocol-oriented programming (POP) paradigm.  By this
>>> statement I mean that they tell us that with POP we should begin our
>>> design with the protocol rather than with the superclass as we did
>>> with OOP however the protocol design tends to mirror the superclass
>>> design of OOP.  They also tell us that we should use extensions to add
>>> common functionality to types that conform to a protocol as we did
>>> with superclasses in OOP.  While protocols and protocol extensions are
>>> arguably two of the most important concepts of POP these tutorials
>>> seem to be missing some other very important concepts.
>>> 
>>> In this post I would like to compare Protocol-Oriented design to
>>> Object-Oriented design to highlight some of the conceptual
>>> differences.  You can view the blog post here:
>>> http://masteringswift.blogspot.com/2016/02/pop-and-oop.html
>>> <http://masteringswift.blogspot.com/2016/02/pop-and-oop.html>
>> 
>> While I agree that simply translating classes into protocols misses the
>> point, it seems as though your post still only deals with the
>> dynamically-polymorphic half of the protocol world.  I don't see any
>> generics in there at all, for example.  If you're really going for a
>> comprehensive view of POP, you need to get into that stuff too.
>> 
>> -- 
>> -Dave
>
> You are correct that POP is about so much more than what was covered
> in this introductory post.  This post was written to be an
> introduction to be Protocol-Oriented programming with a comparison to
> Object-Oriented programming.
>
> POP was introduced to the World less than a year ago.  

Yes, I was there ;-)

> Over the next few years, as Swift changes and matures; the
> Protocol-Oriented programming paradigm will mature with it.  Hopefully
> I can continue to write about these changes as well.

I hope so.

> My book does cover POP and the technologies that make up POP more
> extensively than this post does however I plan on writing several more
> posts, as time allows with my day job, to expand not only on this post
> but also on the material in my book.

I'm definitely interested to see more.

Thanks for your work on this,
-- 
-Dave