Astro Hacker News - Dr. Alan Kay on the meaning of "object-oriented programming" (2003)

ahartmetz |next [-]

That's the Smalltalk school of OOP. There is also the Simula school. It is kind of unfortunate that they use the same name.

mycall |root |parent [-]

> OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things.

How does Simula differ here?

ahartmetz |root |parent [-]

AFAIU, Simula focused more on types and inheritance and less on late-binding, in particular not of "all things".

Alan Kay's distaste for (static) types is just his opinion and an original contribution of IMO rather dubious value.

After the dust has settled, it seems like the most valuable parts of OOP are private data, convenience (no need to repeat the class name in a method call), good fit for some domains, and interfaces.

jqpabc123 |root |parent [-]

private data, convenience

Which can be easily achieved without OOP.

jqpabc123 |next |previous [-]

I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual computers on a network, only able to communicate with messages

It was originablly conceived as a simulation of a distributed system.

Distributed systems can be useful but does anyone really believe that they are simpler or easier to develop and maintain?

The amazing part to me is that so many were trained and convinced to accept that adopting this simulation could make all programming easier or somehow "better". As if adding complexity would magically lead to simplification.