The New Programming (Part I): Functional Object-Oriented Programming (FOOP)

Posted on August 28th, 2006 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Ideas, Programming, Semantic Unit Architecture.

In my last post, “Free as in speech, not as in beer,” I made the rather outlandish claim that open source software will not truly live up to its arrogant claims of freedom until there is freedom for everyone; that everyone with the wit and ambition would be able to understand how software was constructed and even be able to manipulate the code themselves. Now you may argue with me that making software architecture this simple is downright impossible when 30-60% of university students fail their first programming course. And you may be right; I didn’t set a goal based on its achievability.

But it would be silly to give up on a goal with such a wide potential. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and tool a new paradigm of software architecture. To some extent, we have the pieces we need; all that’s needed is a bit (lot) of imagination and hard work.

We can summarize this in three main points:

  1. Programs should be made of individual components that can be easily understood.
  2. Components should be able to function independently; we should not have to guide them. Instead, they should have well-defined behaviors.
  3. Components should be able to handle all sorts of input.

(more…)

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