An Aristotelian understanding of object-oriented programming

  • Authors:
  • Derek Rayside;Gerard T. Campbell

  • Affiliations:
  • Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada;Department of Philosophy, St Jerome's University, Waterloo, Canada

  • Venue:
  • OOPSLA '00 Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

The folklore of the object-oriented programming community at times maintains that object-oriented programming has drawn inspiration from philosophy, specifically that of Aristotle. We investigate this relation, first of all, in the hope of attaining a better understanding of object-oriented programming and, secondly, to explain aspects of Aristotelian logic to the computer science research community (since it differs from first order predicate calculus in a number of important ways). In both respects we endeavour to contribute to the theory of objects, albeit in a more philosophical than mathematical fashion.