gingerBillon Lobsters • Recommends
The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake
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#oop#entitycomponentsystem#caseymuratori
Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025
Better Software Conference
32K subscribers • 7 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 13 people: 11 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 1 in engineering communities.
- Presented by Casey Muratori
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
927K views1 year ago13 recommendations
Software designHistory and cultureObject-oriented designDesign patternsHistory of computing
Casey Muratori traces the history of object-oriented programming from the 1960s to examine how its core ideas and alternatives developed.
Casey Muratori's talk at BSC 2025. Casey's links: - ComputerEnhance.com/ - x.com/cmuratori/ BSC links: - BetterSoftwareConference.com/ - x.com/BetterSoftwareC Chapters: Talk Q&AWhy it's here
13 people recommend this, 2 dispute itWhat people say. Recommended as a deep, historical exploration of how object-oriented programming and entity component systems evolved over decades.
Moments people linked to
u/WalkerCodeRangerAzoth Languagein r/ProgrammingLanguages • Recommends
Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025
This is ostenibly about OOP vs ECS. However, it is mostly a history of programming languages and their development of records and objects. There is some obscure information in here that I am not sure is avaible elsewhere.
jauntywundrkindon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Fifty Shades of OOP”
…s like the brief outline for a Speaking for the Dead for OOP. Huge amount of things to lots of different people over time. Seconding @rawgabbit's recommendation for Casey Muratori's The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake, which really is hunting back and back for the cosmogenesis of objects, and covers so much terrain. Objectogenesis? link to this video…
fmjreyon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Fifty Shades of OOP”
Here is an example of a 2006 rant that qualifies: link OO conflates many different aspects that are often orthogonal but have been conflated together opportunistically rather than by sound rigor. Clearly most languages allow for functions outside classes. It's clearly the case today especially with FP gaining momentum, but it's also clear back then when Java and the JVM were created. I think smalltalk was the only other language that had this limitation. Like others in this thread, I can only recommend the big OOPS video: link to this video
abetuskon Hacker News • Recommends
On “The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]”
…ut it's almost impossible to take something that solves simple problems and scale it up into something that solves hard problems I understand the context but this, in general, is abysmally bad advice. I'm not sure about language design or system architecture but this is almost universally not true for any mathematical or algorithmic pursuit. 0 link to this video…
ndiddyon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Java was not underhyped in 1997 (2021)”
There's a really good talk about the history of OOP going back to the early 60s that goes over this point. The whole "90s style OOP isn't OOP as it was originally intended" thing is largely a myth. When Kay and other OOP pioneers were describing Smalltalk and OOP to professional developers, they all used 90s Java style "compile-time hierarchy of encapsulation that matches the domain model" OOP to explain it. Smalltalk-80: The Language , a book by some of the original designers of Smalltalk, even uses the same shape class inheritance example you'll see in every introductory Java textbook. Here's a link to the talk, timestamped to when he goes over this. link to this video
hikeron Hacker News • Recommends
On “Object-oriented design patterns in C and kernel development”
Plexes are first mentioned in 1960 link and the paper even starts with a critique of the efficiency of Lisp's approach for representing data with cons pairs (citing McCarthy's paper from the same year). You might also want to watch Casey's great talk on the history of OOP link to this video
OhMeadhbhon Hacker News • Recommends
On “How to stop functional programming (2016)”
This is the video that's been going around. It's a bit long and could have been compacted into a 20 minute video, but if you have the time, it's a good overview for people without a computer science background. "Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025" link to this video But if your point is there aren't any written articles about stuff like this, I agree. If they're out there, they're a bit outside the mainstream.
rawgabbiton Hacker News • Recommends
On “Fifty Shades of OOP”
Muratori traced the history of OOP to the original documents. Skip to the 1:18 mark if you want to skip to his findings. link to this video
jodrellblankon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work”
…back to Douglas T. Ross's work in the 1950's. From Ross at MIT in 1960 to Ivan Sutherland working on Sketchpad at MIT in 1963, and both chains influencing Alan Kay and Smalltalk. Where the different ideas in OOP came from, how they came together through which programming languages, who was working on what, and when, and why. It's interesting. 1 link to this video…
afiorion Hacker News • Recommends
On “I Write Games in C (yes, C)”
I enjoyed the pragmatic historical definition of OOP given in link to this video where essential it can be seen as subtype polymorphism
eskaon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Bjarne Stroustrup: How do I deal with memory leaks?”
Sounds like you would appreciate this talk: link to this video Personally I use C or something, anything other than C++ really, if I need something more ergonomic or provably correct. Many excuse C++’s design history with “they didn’t know better”, but the oft forgotten history explained in that video shows otherwise.
Rendelloon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Code duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction”
That's one of the things Mike was pushing back on (in the context of C++ / game dev; there's a good example ~20 min in). In case you haven't seen it, Casey Muratori's The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake digs into the different ideas and viewpoints surrounding OOP and how it coalesced into a dogma: link to this video
romanivon Hacker News • Disputes
On “The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]”
From the video: "It's like, yeah, he said that in 2003, right? He said that after a very long time. So why did he say it? It's because 10 years earlier, he was already saying he kind of soured on it." link to this video He mentions Alan Kay about dozen times and uses quotes and dates to create a specific narrative about Smalltalk. That narrative is demonstrably false.
Mathnerd314on Hacker News • Disputes
On “The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]”
Casey says he “didn’t really cover Alan Kay” link to this video To me that says that Kay wasn’t a major focus of his research. That seems to be reflected in the talk itself: I counted 6 Bjorne sources, 4 Alan Kay sources, 2 more related to Smalltalk, and about 10 focused on Sketchpad, Douglas Ross, and others. By source count, the talk is roughly 18% about Alan Kay and 27% about Smalltalk overall - not a huge part. As far as the narrative, probably the clearest expression of Casey's thesis is at link to this video "Alan Kay had a degree in molecular biology. ... he was thinking of little tiny cells that communicate back and forth but which do not reach across into each other's domain to do different things. And…
u/Buttons840in r/ProgrammingLanguages • Mentions
On “Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025”
[video
This part convinced me that ignoring sum types and exhaustiveness checking is possibly the biggest mistake in programming languages ever.