class/subclass and the dominance of object-oriented programming

I going through the Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_representation_and_reasoning

I find the following sentence very interesting:

> the frame communities and the rule-based researchers realized that there was a synergy between their approaches. Frames were good for representing the real world, described as classes, subclasses, slots (data values) with various constraints on possible values

That goes against my own experience where the class/subclass hierarchy
does not help with system design, in fact, it constrains a programming
language in a framework that leads to broken architectures. Class and
subclass I think should be the exception, not the rule. It is more and
more plausible to me that thinking in terms of hierarchies is a social
heritage that comes from the concentration of power. It is not
necessary. One or two levels of trees can help understand a problem
better, but not generalized trees. It seems to me, the class/subclass
thing that is embodied in the programming language community as
Object-Oriented Programming was forced by western / european natural
language heritage because of the structure of sentences in English and
French and other languages where the subject comes before the verb
followed by "complements". It leads to a notation in English that easy
to read like a sentence:

  amirouche.likes(scheme, programming, language)

I am not saying, one should break everything apart and rebuild.
So-called, Object-Oriented-Programming bolt several things together
that must be taken apart, studied separately and carefully.

NB: If mathematicians were stuck with subject-verb-complement
notation, I bet we would not have computers as of yet.

Received on Monday, 29 June 2020 19:32:34 UTC