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Comment by banku_brougham | Hacker News Reader

honest question, not a serious SDE here. In what ways is julia not supportive of OOP?

It doesn't have interfaces for example. It doesn't have access modifiers. Also, not sure if this belongs to OOP but working with optionals is cumbersome.

Python also doesn’t have interfaces or access modifiers. Would you consider Python to have bad support for OOP by those criteria?

Yes, Python definitely has bad support for OOP.

Smalltalk doesn't have them, either.

Indeed. Alan Kay might take some issue with this notion of OOP.

Only if define OOP as what java does.

Smalltalk might be a better example.

Yes, although Python feels more suitable for OOP for some reason, not sure why... perhaps it's the object.method() notation. It's often more natural and readable and allows better autocompletion in an IDE. Also, I prefer that methods are defined inside of a class, it's immediately clear what is a top level functions and what is a method belonging to a class or struct.

Well Julia sort-of does have interfaces, it’s just that those interfaces are protocols and only conventions (ie there’s no way to say “my type will implement Foo interface”). There is an interface for iteration. If you want to implement it then you just have to implement the iterate function for your type and zero and 1 parameters. Similarly the way to say that your type has a length isn’t to implement the HasLength interface but to just implement the length function.

Again sorry for being dense but:

- aren’t access modifiers the way to define scope? That is possible in julia.

- getters and setters, wouldn’t those be defined in a struct in julia?

- inheritance: pretty sure this doesn’t exist in julia.

I seriously barely understand, i’m reading from the doc here:

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/types/index.html

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