The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five Year Mistake

Summary

The video from my Better Software Conference presentation is now available! You can watch it in its entirety here:I tried to keep the runtime under two hours while still painting as accurate a historical picture as I could. As a result, I had to leave out many fascinating stories because they weren’t essential to the topic. Entire plotlines - like the development of Smalltalk and the inspirations specific to it, etc. - were not included.To prepare the talk, I went through many hundreds (perhaps over a thousand?) pages of source material. I really enjoyed piecing together the bigger picture from all the pieces as I found them. Beyond what’s in the talk, there’s a lot of other things I’d love to share with everyone, but I’m not sure how to best do that. Perhaps I’ll do a live stream next week where we can go through some of the documents I didn’t feature in the talk? Is there any interest in that? Let me know in the comments!For now, if the talk leaves you wanting to explore further, there are four collected “histories” that can get you started. I have linked to them below, with an explanation of what each contains.The Early History of Smalltalk. This is Alan Kay’s retrospective on how Smalltalk was developed. Because C++ was the language that pushed the “class hierarchy” methodology into widespread industry use, I left out most of the interesting twists and turns on the Smalltalk side. If you’d like to read more about those, this paper is the place to start.Please note that I have linked to a very specific version. One of the things you will find out if you do research like this is that historical papers are often scanned multiple times, leading to different versions floating around the internet. Many scans of this paper do not include the appendices, which have valuable information for the historical spelunker! The PDF I linked to has the appendices.A History of C++. Like its Smalltalk counterpart, this is Bjarne Stroustrup’s retrospective on C++. Stroustrup publish...