[PRL] Bob Harper's new blog

[Matthias Felleisen]

On Mar 17, 2011, at 10:06 AM, William D Clinger wrote:

> Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> 
>> Inheritance is a static concept. How can it affect the run-time?
> 
> Inheritance creates both inclusion and ad hoc sum polymorphism,
> thereby necessitating dynamic method dispatch at run time.  (There
> is additional run-time overhead caused by inheritance of interfaces
> and by the covariance of the array type constructor for mutable
> arrays in current OO languages, which is indirectly attributable
> to inheritance.)
> 
> More importantly, static concepts can be antimodular even if they
> don't affect the run-time.  That's what Harper is complaining about:
> 
> On Mar 16, 2011, at 11:01 PM, Asumu Takikawa wrote:
>> Quoth Bob Harper in his latest blog post:
>> 
>> Worse, object-oriented programming, a species of imperative programming,
>> is fundamentally antimodular because of the absurd emphasis on
>> inheritance and the reliance on class-based organizations in which
>> functionality metastasizes throughout a program.


This seems like a rehash of Bob's language to me, but it is equally likely that I too stupid to understand the arguments of compiler writers. 

How does the dynamic dispatch of inheritance differ from the 'random' jumps induced by calls to first-class functions in FPLs?