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Comment by gmfawcett | Hacker News Reader

We should stop invoking Alan Kay's ancient opinion in OOP discussions. I suggest we rebrand his flavour of programming as "message oriented programming" (MOP), thank it for its continuing contributions to the field, and recognize that contemporary OOP is a valid but different solution space.

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Rather, we should insist on calling object oriented programming what it is, and come up with an acronym for the poor imitations.

How about Class-Reified Abstract Programming? If the shoe fits...

In this era, DeepClass is a kool name.

Too much mutation leads to deep state.

Modern OOP isn't a poor imitation of anything, it's a distinct approach with its own merits. The No True OOP meme is old and tired, and frankly pointless.

Agreed. Smalltalk is Smalltalk and corporate OOP(Java/C#) is what it is. Neither is superior or more pure.

It’s imperative programming with dots/infix sigils and either a little or a lot of ceremony.

Smalltalk came after Simula, which created the "poor imitation" you refer to. The reason you remember Kay instead of Simula is because Simula's ideas actually worked and so instantly got adopted by too many languages to care where it came from.

Clarity is certainly important, in which case I could have said “OOP should have been...”

Except: Smalltalk still lives (Squeak) and Erlang takes messaging to the extreme.

I've not used Erlang much, really, but it seems like a really nice fusion of messaging across agents and immutable state within agents. Elixir has long been on my list of languages to properly pick up...

Also since Simula proceeded Smalltalk, and C++ is inspired by Simula, and Java by C++.

I always take a point to address the "Java coding in C++", as what actually happened was Java adopting what was the C++ approach to library development before Oak turned into Java.

That's funny but for me Erlang is much more MOP than Smalltalk

Sure. Reading the qualifications that Kay makes at the end of his quote (above), he leaves room for Erlang to be MOP. I suspect that he just wasn't familiar with the language.

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