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Comment by nemoniac | Hacker News Reader

“I invented the term ‘object-oriented’, and I can tell you C++ wasn't what I had in mind.” ~ Alan Kay, OOPSLA ‘97

Just because someone coined the term, doesn't mean that they get to define it. The industry absolutely doesn't use OOP in any way similar to what Alan Kay does, and the former is the de facto correct usage.

It's also worth pointing out that as smart and important of a guy as he is, Alan Kay has not been employed as a software developer for a very long time.

What OO has become in the industry is a product of practical concerns encountered by people working in the field. Can't say I like it much, but working in this industry for 25ish years, I can understand the pragmatic "whys" of every step of language and tool design fairly well.

I believe Erlang/Elixir are closer to what he had in mind. (Processes with encapsulated state passing messages to each other.)

And also Smalltalk, I believe. It appeared ~15 years earlier than Erlang. The idea of holding encapsulated state and receiving messages is its core concept, AFAIK.

guess who headed the smalltalk team and what team he was working on when he invented the term 'object-oriented'

It does make a lot more sense if messaging is asynchronous, because the metaphor breaks down immediately if sending any message requires the sender to freeze until a reply comes back.

I don't think anyone would "want" CPP. It feels like it's multiple layers of "this is how we've always done it" interleaved with some really good ideas (STL).

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