Java Is Magic: the Gathering (or Poker) and Haskell Is Go (the Game)
Of course, all of this that I am slinging at OOP is directed at a culture. Is object-oriented programming innately that way? Not necessarily. In fact, I think that it’s pretty clear Alan Kay’s vision (“IQ is a lead weight”) was the opposite of that. His point was that, when complexity occurs, it should be encapsulated behind a simpler interface. That idea, now uncontroversial and realized within functional programming, was right on. Files and sockets, for example, are complex beasts in implementation, but manageable specifically because they tend to conform to simpler and well-understood interfaces: you can
readwithout having to care whether you’re manipulating a robot arm in physical space (i.e. reading a hard drive) or pulling data out of RAM (memory file) or taking user input from the “file” called “standard input”. Alan Kay was not encouraging the proliferation of complex objects; he was simply looking to build a toolset that enables to people to work with complexity when it occurs. One should note that major object-oriented victories (concepts like “file” and “server”) are no longer considered “object-oriented programming”, just as “alternative medicine” that works is recognized as just “medicine”.[…]
Where is this whole argument leading? First, there’s a concept in game design of “dryness”. A game that is dry is abstract, subtle, generally avoiding or limiting the role of random chance, and while the game may be strategically deep, it doesn’t have immediate thematic appeal. Go is a great game, and it’s also very dry. It has white stones and black stones and a board, but that’s it. No wizards, no teleportation effects, not even castling. You put a stone on the board and it sits there forever (unless the colony is surrounded and it dies). Go also values control and elegance, as programmers should. We want our programs to be “dry” and boring. We want the problems that we solve to be interesting and complex, but the code itself should be so elegant as to be “obvious”, and elegant/obvious things are (in this way) “boring”.
