Alan Kay on the misunderstanding of OOP (1998)
I find it interesting that everyone gets so up-beat about the ideology or philosophical debate about objects sending each object messages, hell even not relying to a message one object send you until a later date. Without even thinking about concurrency, state, and hell even the basics such as cyclic loops within a event based system!<p>Though I keep hearing from Alan and other prominent language designers that we still are holding onto this old 1960 mental model of command and control, or structured design concepts. Even some well spoken people suggest that the whole notion of object&#x27;s are worthless to programmers because it takes place within the notion of classes and constraints of the machine.<p>This whole philosophical debate about understanding&#x2F;miss-understanding&#x2F;correct usage of OOP is just a complete waste of time.<p>For what its worth I consider object&#x27;s simply as a basic level category of procedures and data tied to a namespace. If the category requires state then consider it as a object otherwise its considered a module.<p>I&#x27;ve seen too many project&#x27;s that have drunken the cool aid and has resulted in 5-10 level deep inheritance tree&#x27;s with their own branching logic trying to fit behavior to a specific taxonomy.