Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025

What people said

jauntywundrkind · 2025-11 · Strong recommendation

I'd love a deeper dive on how Objects work in NeXTSTEP. From their brochures, they talk about objects being persistent and distributable, that in a workgroup of people everyone can rely on the objects being up to date. I've always been so curious what the broader technical ecosystem looks like here. Presumably there are still processes running on systems. But these processes have lots of objects in them? And the objects are using Mach message passing to converse with other processes elsewhere? Within an application, are objects communicating across Mach too? There's so much high level rhetoric about. Such as this bit. But I'd love a real technical view at what was happening, what objects really were here. [LINK] [LINK] This is a fun work. It feels like the brief outline for a Speaking for the Dead for OOP. Huge amount of things to lots of different people over time. Seconding @rawgabbit's recommendation for Casey Muratori's The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake, which really is hunting back and back for the cosmogenesis of objects, and covers so much terrain. Objectogenesis? [VIDEO]

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fmjrey · 2025-11 · Strong recommendation

Here is an example of a 2006 rant that qualifies: [LINK] OO conflates many different aspects that are often orthogonal but have been conflated together opportunistically rather than by sound rigor. Clearly most languages allow for functions outside classes. It's clearly the case today especially with FP gaining momentum, but it's also clear back then when Java and the JVM were created. I think smalltalk was the only other language that had this limitation. Like others in this thread, I can only recommend the big OOPS video: [VIDEO]

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Rendello · 2026-06 · Recommendation

That's one of the things Mike was pushing back on (in the context of C++ / game dev; there's a good example ~20 min in). In case you haven't seen it, Casey Muratori's The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake digs into the different ideas and viewpoints surrounding OOP and how it coalesced into a dogma: [VIDEO]

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