Comment by Rochus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rochus | Hacker News Reader

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> “Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.”

Not sure what he meant by "object-oriented", but he - as the other members of the IFIP - was well aware of Simula 67, and he belonged to the faction that rejected van Wijngaarden's proposal and regarded Simula 67 as "a more fruitful development" [1]. So - if he said or wrote that at all - it's likely related to what Kay understood by the term, or the implementation as a dynamically typed, originally interpreted language done at Xerox PARC, not to the kind of "object-orientation" for which Simula 67 is recognized today (remember that the term "object-oriented" was originally not applied to Simula 67 by the public, but to Smalltalk).

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2948437_Edsger_Dijk...

> if he said or wrote that at all

See “TUG LINES”, Issue 32 [1]

> it's likely related to what Kay understood by the term, or the implementation as a dynamically typed, originally interpreted language done at Xerox PARC

I think the comment was referring to what they were doing at Xerox PARC - yes.

There are more recent writings of him taking jabs at Californian universities for teaching Java to freshmen instead of what he was doing in Austin - teaching functional programming via Haskell. [2]

[1] Dijkstra, E.W. Quoted by Bob Crawford. TUG lines, Journal of the Turbo User Group, 32, Aug.–Sep. (1989)

[2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/OtherDocs/To%20the%20Bud... (2001)

Thanks for the references.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to find [1] anywhere on the web; the CHM only seems to have issues up to 22. Do you have a link where I can access it?

The other one [2] is also interesting, but the claim is not against OO, but "that functional programs are much more readily appreciated as mathematical objects than imperative ones, so that you can teach what rigorous reasoning about programs amounts to", and that "Java [..] is a mess", which again applies to the language quality (see also Brinch Hansen's paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/312009.312034), not the paradigm.

[2] doesn’t actually seem to call out California by name, though. It would have been a little unfair if he had, since California’s most famous public university was teaching intro CS with Scheme and SICP at the time.

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