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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Erlang's creator, Joe Armstrong, said "Erlang might be the only object oriented language because the 3 tenets of object oriented programming are that it's based on message passing, that you have isolation between objects and have polymorphism." (Third point at http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop)

So maybe OO is not that bad, it's the so called OO languages that didn't go all the way to implement it properly. Still they've been very successful so far. It means that many people liked what they had to offer. This might be about to change even quickly but I won't be so harsh agaist what we have under our fingerprints now. Not perfect but not a disaster.

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Nobody can agree on what OO is:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DefinitionsForOo

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NobodyAgreesOnWhatOoIs

(Of course, I mean that "Everyone knows precisely what OO is, but if you get enough of them in the same room you see distinct camps forming, each with their own definition of OO which is incompatible in some respect with the definition every other camp has.")

What about Smalltalk? Possibly the only other Object-Oriented language?

That interview is about both Erlang and Smalltalk. Ralph Johnson, not one of Smalltalk's designers but close to what we'd call an evangelist nowadays, speaks about Smalltalk. Unfortunately I can't find one sentence that captures his view about Smalltalk's OO. I quote Johnson about Erlang, and in a way about Smalltalk itself:

"The thing about Erlang is that it's in some sense 2 languages, at least you program it 2 levels because one is the functional language that you use to write a single process and then there is what you think about all these processes and how do they interact, one process is sending messages to the other. At a higher level, that Erlang is object oriented, at the lowest level it's a pure functional language and that's how it got advertised for a long time."

[...]

"The only way in Smalltalk to interact with an object is send it a message, but the issue is what message do you have. It's the same thing in Erlang"

So it seems to me that he's saying that Erlang's processes are close to Smalltalk's objects.

I recommend reading all the transcript (much quicker than watching the video).

Ah yes, thanks for clarifying.. I didn't quite get as far as watching or reading the article due to work distractions. :/

Sure, Smalltalk is the only OO language: message-passing, isolation and polymorphism. Java was a pathetic copy.

“The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.” – Joe Armstrong