While reading Looking at Philosophy[1], I came across its discussion of Kierkegaard saying that there is some existential being that is left when all the "roles" of that being are stripped away. With my advocation in Existential Programming that "roles" be promoted over "is-a subclassing", it begs a deep question. If we have factored out all state and behavior from a class, moving them into various roles, when do we know that it is time to create a new instance of a "thing" to which roles will be attached?
For example, in a language like Javascript, one can create an empty object instance and dynamically add in attributes and methods later. This capability can be used to implement "mixin" classes that each encapsulate the properties and behavior associated with some role.
While it is true that we can program the operations of instantiating an empty (i.e. essence-less) object and graft in the mixin classes for each role we expect to fulfill, the Philosophical question is, how could we know that a new blank instance is needed if we didn't have a particular "thing" in mind in the first place? I.E. doesn't a thing still have to start as a particular "kind" of thing in order to know when it is time to create a new one?
In still other words, is there an actual case of a "thing" that consists only of roles? Are we sure that one of those roles isn't a thing itself? Does the technology give us the capability to do something that makes no ontological sense?
[1] "Looking At Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy Made Lighter",2005, Palmer
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