ESR on post-C landscape

Thu Nov 16 22:45:34 UTC 2017

On Thursday, 16 November 2017 at 22:27:58 UTC, sarn wrote:
> In the 90s (and a bit into the 00s) there was a pretty extreme 
> "everything must be an object; OO is the solution to 
> everything" movement in the industry.

Yes, around 1991, the computer mags were all over C++ and the 
bookshelves in the programming section of book stores too…

> Look around most programming languages today and you'll see 
> objects, so in that sense OOP never failed.  What failed was 
> the hype train.  It's no different from most other tech fads 
> (except XML has declined drastically since the hype passed).

*nods* I recall Kristen Nygaard (driving force behind OO and 
Simula) being sceptical of some of the drive away from OO 
modelling and towards OO-everything in the mid 90s. However in 
Scandinavia I think the focus was predominantly on supporting 
modelling. OOP is a way to support the model. I never heard any 
of the people behind OO suggest anything more than that OO was 
one paradigm among many. Nygaard also believed that OO modelling 
would be useful outside programming, as a mode-of-thinking when 
doing analysis, for instance in government.

Of course there are plenty of pure OO languages that also are 
interesting in their own right: Smalltalk, Beta, gBeta, Self, and 
in online text games Moo. Javascript could have made it onto that 
list too, if it had been given a more suitable syntax and 
slightly different semantics.