Towards real OOP — contravariance

I wonder if the boom of dynamic languages is not the effect of the incorrectly stated limits of statically typed languages like Java or C#.

It is pretty basic, but anyway:

interface Contract
  def compute(input String) Object;
end

Interface is a contract indeed — in this example we say that if you refine compute you should be able to tackle with String in input and Object in output. But let’s say we write:

class Worker refines Contract
  refines def compute(input Object) Int •••
end

Did we just violate the contract of the interface? No — we were supposed to produce Object, and Int is Object. We were supposed to cope with String in the input and we do even better — we handle all possible types (nothing is higher in type hierarchy than Object). We fulfilled the contract and added a bonus for those who use Worker type directly.

Well, I cannot speak for other languages, but Skila supports both sides of the refinement.

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