[swift-users] Comparing POP to OOP

[Dave Abrahams]

on Wed Mar 09 2016, Evan Maloney <emaloney-AT-gilt.com> wrote:

> On Mar 5, 2016, at 5:15 PM, Jon Hoffman via swift-users <swift-users at swift.org> wrote:
>> To be honest, I think that Apple may have done a disservice to POP
>> by giving it the name “Protocol-Oriented Programming”.  With OOP and
>> POP having such similar names, people tend to relate them together
>> and in my opinion, how you design your application with POP is
>> fundamentally different than with OOP.  Hopefully I will be able to
>> write some additional posts about designing applications in a POP
>> way using case studies.  Just a matter of finding time
>> 
> Interestingly, we just had a discussion about abstract classes on the
> Swift Evolution mailing list, and many of the people who opposed the
> idea of adding the feature cited the fact that Swift was a
> protocol-oriented programming language rather than an object-oriented
> programming language.
>
> By that argument, because Swift is protocol-oriented, classes should
> be treated like second-class citizens that shouldn't evolve new
> features and don't deserve the same level of functionality provided by
> just about every other object-oriented programming language (aside
> from ObjC).
>
> Calling Swift protocol-oriented seems to have led to a certain level
> of dogmatism and reflexive opposition to anything seen as
> object-oriented; it's protocols vs. classes.
>
> Personally, what I love about Swift is that it doesn't fit into just
> one "oriented programming" box. But perhaps I'm in the minority.

For every good idea, there's always some fraction of the community that
will take it too far.  Swift is more protocol-oriented than
object-oriented at its core, but Swift is a multiparadigm language.

-- 
-Dave