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Comment by fiddlerwoaroof | Hacker News Reader

I think this is mostly a reflection of the thing Java/C#/C++ have popularized as “OOP”: if one uses Common Lisp’s CLOS, much of the boilerplate associated with “design patterns” and OO architecture evaporates.

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Yes absolutely. The article was written around 2000 when Java was the new sexy thing. When Joe talks about OOP being overhyped, he wasn’t talking about Rust’s traits or Common Lisp. He’s speaking about the hype around Java and C++, and the then-lauded three pillars of OO: Encapsulation, Inheritance and Polymorphism.

Not all OO works that way. In retrospect, inheritance was probably a mistake. And as far as I can tell, modern “OO-lite” coding styles focussing on composition over inheritance work pretty well. Alan Kay: “When I invented object oriented programming, C++ was not what I had in mind.”

My inclination is to say that inheritance isn't the mistake, the mistake is making methods part of a class: my experience with inheritance in CL is that having generic functions/methods as their own first-class construct makes inheritance less of a minefield.

I learned OOP in 1992, using Turbo Pascal 5.5, and got hold of Turbo Pascal 6.0 with Turbo Vision, shortly thereafter.

My follow up OOP languages until 2000 were C++ alongside OWL, VCL, MFC. Clipper 5.x, Eiffel, Sather, Modula-3, Oberon variants, Smalltalk, CLOS, SWI Prolog, Delphi and naturally Java.

In 1999 I got a signed copy from the ECOOP 1999 proceedings, full of alternative OOP approaches.

We should strive to actually provide proper bases to CS students, instead of market fads.

Actually, I said: "I invented the term "object-oriented", and I didn't have C++ in mind".

In other comments here I explain why "object-oriented" was a too quick and bad choice for what I thought I was doing ...

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