4 ms·

I studied the history of OOP a while back because I was curious, and I organized what I learned into my personal wiki[1]. From what I remember, there were quite

by jdw64 4mo ago

I studied the history of OOP a while back because I was curious, and I organized what I learned into my personal wiki[1]. From what I remember, there were quite a few different perspectives on it. One view traces OOP's practical ancestry back to Ole-Johan Dahl's Simula. From Alan Kay's perspective, on the other hand, an object was something like a small computer of its own. The two main lineages of OOP are Simula and Smalltalk. But from what I recall, modern languages actually inherited more from the Simula side in practical terms, while the terminology and philosophy were influenced more by Smalltalk. [1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/wiki/object-oriented-programming https://www.makonea.com/en-US/wiki/object-oriented-programmi...

Rochus 4mo ago
Cool; though a few facts on your landing page might need some reconsideration. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36879311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36879311. > something like a small computer of its own Which corresponds pretty well with the Simula I concept, published 1966 in the Communications of the ACM. A Simula event notice (time, process) in the sequencing set is just a message step(process, time) in a priority mailbox; the two are the same mathematical object, making Simula's discrete-event active processes and Kay's message-passing active objects trivially isomorphic.
- jdw64 4mo ago
  thanks! I checked the link and there are indeed quite a few inaccuracies in the initial part. I'll go through it and make corrections.
  - Rochus 4mo ago
    The IEEE milestone about OOP is also worth reading: https://ethw.org/Milestones:Object-Oriented_Programming,_1961-1967 https://ethw.org/Milestones:Object-Oriented_Programming,_196...
    - jdw64 4mo ago
      Thank you so much. Sometimes I wish there were more documents out there that organized the historical aspects of programming like this.
      - noelwelsh 4mo ago
        You'd probably like the work of Tomas Petricek: https://tomasp.net/ https://tomasp.net/ He does research in "the history and philosophy of programming", amongst other things.
        jdw64 4mo ago
        Amazing. This is exactly the kind of content I wanted to put on my homepage. Thank you
shevy-java 4mo ago
Depends on the language. I would argue that ruby inherited more from Smalltalk than from Simula, for instance.
- Rochus 4mo ago
  “I wanted a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python" and "Ruby's class library is an object-oriented reorganization of Perl functionality--plus some Smalltalk and Lisp stuff" (see "An Interview with the Creator of Ruby", 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20041220041220/http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2001/11/29/ruby.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041220041220/http://www.linuxd...).
tskj 4mo ago
You might like Casey Muratori's "The Big OOPs" talk about this, if you haven't seen it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI It's my favorite deep dive into the subject, it's super thoughtful and well structured.
- klibertp 4mo ago
  This comment was dead for some reason; I vouched for it. Casey Muratori is a well-known developer with a GUI/game engine background, which gives him a valuable perspective on OOP. In both domains, OOP is both popular and problematic, and his experience suggests that he might know what he's talking about. I didn't watch the whole video, but from the description and intro, it seems to fit the discussion we're having here.
  - klibertp 4mo ago
    Too late to edit, I watched the talk. Really well-researched and entertainingly told story. I'd say games are a bit special, though. Smalltalk works pretty well in interactive applications - while it's true that encapsulation is an important part of the language, it also provides all the tools to pry objects open when needed. Out of the box, it's much better at that than C++. The problem is that video games demand very high performance, and Smalltalk is even slower than normal when you use reflection. If not for that, it's perfectly doable (if not very convenient) to treat a Smalltalk image as a soup of data with behavior attached. Casey also mentioned the focus on education in Alan Kay's projects: it's probably one of the reasons Smalltalk is largely devoid of modules, namespaces, packages, and even files with source code - things that are very useful when collaborating in teams, consuming external dependencies, etc. There are Smalltalk implementations that provide those, but they're either very niche or very niche and extremely expensive... And still slow. Still, interactive software that doesn't have the performance requirements of games is definitely more convenient to write in Smalltalk than in C++! I have high hopes for GToolkit, I just need to port a few ideas from VisualWorks and figure out how to actually set up a project structure friendly to external agents (the GT agent harness is very nice, but it forces you to use an API, which is way too expensive for the results you get...)

by jdw64 4mo ago

Rochus 4mo ago

Cool; though a few facts on your landing page might need some reconsideration. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36879311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36879311. > something like a small computer of its own Which corresponds pretty well with the Simula I concept, published 1966 in the Communications of the ACM. A Simula event notice (time, process) in the sequencing set is just a message step(process, time) in a priority mailbox; the two are the same mathematical object, making Simula's discrete-event active processes and Kay's message-passing active objects trivially isomorphic.

jdw64 4mo ago
thanks! I checked the link and there are indeed quite a few inaccuracies in the initial part. I'll go through it and make corrections.
- Rochus 4mo ago
  The IEEE milestone about OOP is also worth reading: https://ethw.org/Milestones:Object-Oriented_Programming,_1961-1967 https://ethw.org/Milestones:Object-Oriented_Programming,_196...
  - jdw64 4mo ago
    Thank you so much. Sometimes I wish there were more documents out there that organized the historical aspects of programming like this.
    - noelwelsh 4mo ago
      You'd probably like the work of Tomas Petricek: https://tomasp.net/ https://tomasp.net/ He does research in "the history and philosophy of programming", amongst other things.
      - jdw64 4mo ago
        Amazing. This is exactly the kind of content I wanted to put on my homepage. Thank you

shevy-java 4mo ago

Depends on the language. I would argue that ruby inherited more from Smalltalk than from Simula, for instance.

Rochus 4mo ago
“I wanted a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python" and "Ruby's class library is an object-oriented reorganization of Perl functionality--plus some Smalltalk and Lisp stuff" (see "An Interview with the Creator of Ruby", 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20041220041220/http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2001/11/29/ruby.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041220041220/http://www.linuxd...).

tskj 4mo ago

You might like Casey Muratori's "The Big OOPs" talk about this, if you haven't seen it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI It's my favorite deep dive into the subject, it's super thoughtful and well structured.

klibertp 4mo ago
This comment was dead for some reason; I vouched for it. Casey Muratori is a well-known developer with a GUI/game engine background, which gives him a valuable perspective on OOP. In both domains, OOP is both popular and problematic, and his experience suggests that he might know what he's talking about. I didn't watch the whole video, but from the description and intro, it seems to fit the discussion we're having here.
- klibertp 4mo ago
  Too late to edit, I watched the talk. Really well-researched and entertainingly told story. I'd say games are a bit special, though. Smalltalk works pretty well in interactive applications - while it's true that encapsulation is an important part of the language, it also provides all the tools to pry objects open when needed. Out of the box, it's much better at that than C++. The problem is that video games demand very high performance, and Smalltalk is even slower than normal when you use reflection. If not for that, it's perfectly doable (if not very convenient) to treat a Smalltalk image as a soup of data with behavior attached. Casey also mentioned the focus on education in Alan Kay's projects: it's probably one of the reasons Smalltalk is largely devoid of modules, namespaces, packages, and even files with source code - things that are very useful when collaborating in teams, consuming external dependencies, etc. There are Smalltalk implementations that provide those, but they're either very niche or very niche and extremely expensive... And still slow. Still, interactive software that doesn't have the performance requirements of games is definitely more convenient to write in Smalltalk than in C++! I have high hopes for GToolkit, I just need to port a few ideas from VisualWorks and figure out how to actually set up a project structure friendly to external agents (the GT agent harness is very nice, but it forces you to use an API, which is way too expensive for the results you get...)