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Anthropomorphism and Object Oriented Programming
An anonymous reader writes: We've all been warned about how anthropomorphizing animals and machines can lead us astray. But Edsger Dijkstra once cautioned (PDF) developers against thinking of their programs that way as well. "I think anthropomorphism is worst of all. I have now seen programs 'trying to do things,' 'wanting to do things,' 'believing things to be true,' 'knowing things' etc. Don't be so naive as to believe that this use of language is harmless. It invites the programmer to identify himself with the execution of the program and almost forces upon him the use of operational semantics." A new article fleshes out Dijkstra's statement, providing a good example of where an anthropomorphized analogy for Object Oriented Programming breaks down when you push it too far.
What gets me is this:
If you don't draw analogies (like anthropomorphism), or abstractions, how the hell do you choose your names in a way that lends itself to understandable code? The author should take his own argument one step further and realize that calling a string of bits a "student" is likewise anthropomorphising the data, and calling another memloc a "Classroom" is applying an anology to what is really going on. Then he could reduce is argument ad-absurdium to requiring that all identifiers be randomly chosenstring to avoid installing unintentional meaning into data structures and procedures/functions.
Someone had to do it.