Object Oriented Programming is not what you think it is. This is why. 

The obligatory Alan Kay quote: "I invented the term "object-oriented programming", and I can tell you I didn't have C++ in mind."

Hi Huw, this series sounds great to me and I'm looking forward for the next episodes.😃

hi Hugh, I bought your course on C pointers few years ago. I not only refreshed my memory bot got even better grasp than ever. Its so cool I stumbled upon your video, cheers!

I was working as a systems programmer for ICL in the 70s. My boss was telling me about Xerox Parc - it seemed space-age to me, compared to the ICL 7502 green screen terminals and the ghastly screenedit editor. Thank you so much for doing this - I used to enjoy your articles in the mags. Best wishes.

Huw, this sort of lesson delivered in a story is such an excellent way to teach as well as to help people understand and remember what they learn. It also really shows how amazing the development of code is and how far it's come. I have your udemy course and really enjoy the passion you share!

Smalltalk was not the first object oriented language. That award goes to Simula, which appeared in 1967. Simula is a superset of Algol, and the addition was Classes…objects. I learned Simula in 1978 and it was my favorite language in school. Smalltalk was important in developing OOP concepts, but it was not the first OOP language.

This sounds like an amazing series, should be so informative!

Huw! I own your book of Ruby and I love it and would like to take the chance to say Thank you! Very interesting video, thanks for taking us back to the times. Helps to realize how far we have come in basically no time. Looking forward to see what the series can teach me.

You filmed yourself in green screen and put in front of your own room? That's cool.

Software engineer here working in automation. This seems like a fantastic series and I will be following along with you, Huw! Thanks for taking the time to put this together! I am fascinated! What part of Wales are you from, I’m from Newport (or as some locals call it “Zooport”) 😅

The Atari 800 had a full screen editor and it was a rare feature when it released. Even basic on pc didn’t have full screen editing until QBasic if I recall

Thanks for sharing this. This makes me grateful as a developer as there are so many options, tools to choose from.

A good reason for Turbo Pascal to have a screen editor was that Pascal is a language that cannot be interpreted one line at a time. You needed to write the whole infrastructure of the module before it could make sense.

really loved the little history lesson esp since it came from your personal experience. looking fwd to the rest of the playlist.

Thank you so much for posting this video. I’ve been telling my engineers that their view of OO is wrong and missing part of the concept for years but never had the time to demonstrate why

Wow, that brought back memories to see that Compaq portable 3 and if I remember right the 5.25" floppy drive has a pushbutton eject. UUsed to repair those things to component level, the PSUs were regarded (with some evidence) as being an absolute git to repair.

Thank you for this Video, Huw. Brought back some happy memories. For what it's worth (very little), I worked with the PenPoint OS and applications in the era of the Apple Newton. This provided an API that was an object oriented disaster. Firstly there was no language support (being written in C), so it was all done by convention and pre-processor magic. Secondly the OO "purists" who wrote it though it would be a really good idea to have inheritance deeply nested in frequently used classes, such as a text entry box. Speaking from memory, that was about 14 levels of object inheritance deep. Why did this matter? It was virtually impossible to find the answer to a question in the documentation unless you already knew the answer - because there was not way to know where in those 14 levels a particular function you were looking for was defined. My job was to port the debugger to the Hobbit processor (big-endian stack-based). The debugger was written by another computer science magister who thought it would be a really good idea to have the debugger include a full C interpreter, and to be able to declare individual variables and functions as "host" or "target", meaning that it had to do cross-compiling on the fly, and packing and byteswapping too. Another example of *Something You Should Never Attempt* (tm). I got it working, which was fun, but I shouldn't have needed to. Usually I can achieve information hiding (encapsulation) in virtually any language I stumble across, and that is usually enough for my limited requirements. Keep it simple is my mantra, particularly in my waning years.

My first introduction to OO was with IBM's Visual age for SmallTalk. Something I never really understood. Time to add it to my bucket list.

if this is a series, will it have a playlist as well?

Wow, I used to work for Olivetti, in the M24 era. I worked for the peripheral division, but a friend of mine was a PC Bios developer. Great to know you worked on it!

Great trip to History! I still remember my wonder when I compiled a scroll down menu in Clipper! I enjoyed my developer work and still love trying new languages and technologies :)

I was happy to find this channel: small talk and adventure games? Amazing content. I have to go through your video series but I’ve been getting deep into languages and was surprised to discover that Sierra Online’s homegrown scripting language: SCI was completely modeled after SmallTalk after their lead systems engineer Jeff Stephenson saw the issue of byte magazine (with the parachute). This ended up being a catalyst for Sierra’s rich history of modern adventure games going forward.

At 10:59: "Add the language that started it all (object orientation), and that is smalltalk". That is not correct. "Simula" was a decade ahead of smalltalk and is the origin of oop.

Dude this series looks so promising, I'm excited to watch the rest. Thank you Huw.

Nice work. Thanks for sharing! Live long and prosper!

Sir, you have a new subscriber. Thank you!

I love it. I also have a Compaq 3 with Smalltalk/V installed! ;)

Hi Huw, I'm so glad you're starting this series. I have done procedural programming in the past and have recently started to learn C# and OOP. This series could not have come at a better time. Other than following this series do you have any advice on how I can get OOP to click? I can follow tutorials and books quite happily, but when I come to write my own programs something is missing, like the pieces are not quite connecting in my mind, which sometimes makes writing OOP code very frustrating. Do you know how frequently you will be releasing videos in this series?

Fantastic video! You're a great historian. You should have way more subscribers.

My first computer was a ZX80, which had 1K of memory, of which 512 bytes was used for video, and more for the os, leaving me with 368 bytes to program in.

My understanding is that Xerox did not have overlapping windows. Lisa/Macintosh introduced that, along with all sorts of other modern GUI conventions.

I'm loving all this.

Sounds like a very interesting challenge. Count on me Huw!

Graduated as software engineer in 2006. The first 5 years I worked solely in Smalltalk - then we made a new system in Java that gradually took over. The system is still in use by the way, and though the Java web system is the only system being developed by that company, but the Smalltalk system is still being used and gets updates once in a while. I left the company in 2015, and have since worked in Java, C#, Javascript, typescript and other, but I miss Smalltalk dearly, I have never been able to code that fast in anything else...

Great content, Huw! I'm trying to get my head around Pascal and it's been a struggle…

"Only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process"... Doesn't that sound a lot like a description of microservices? 😉 In the end, OOP is much more about the design&architecture than about the language used to implement

In my University, the 2021 third year of license degree, had a course on OOP languages. In which we passed two weeks on pharo who is a direct decedent of small talk. They sadly removed the course the year after that due to change in the learning norms.

The CLOS in Common Lisp is also radically different than the C++ notion of Classes.

What a great and interesting episode! 😊👍👌 Greetings from Sweden 🇸🇪🇸🇪🇸🇪

Douglas Englebart was using a mouse and graphical use interface back in the late 1960s... it was his team that literally inspired Xeros to begin research and start Xeros Park. :)

Looking forward to this series on the OOOP ... Original OOP

Commodore also designed an early GUI for the C64 called GEOS but abandoned the project.

@codewithhuw That’s great quote from Kay, but I’d disagree that it doesn’t apply equally to Java and such like. (Except, perhaps, for the late binding of all thing part, since I’m not sure what he meant by that.) As for whether Java (etc) programmers have heard of message passing; when I taught OOP using Java they certainly did. I’ll be viewing the rest of the series to try to better understand the ideas.

love object oriented programming, wish it was real.

They should have called it MOP: Message-Oriented Programming , rather than OOP.

Was Xerox park the future of computing or are we stuck in the pass for decades?

Smalltalk isn't synonymous with OOP, in that not everything in Smalltalk is specific to OOP. Some core ideas of Smalltalk were derived from LISP, especially the extreme late binding. Other early OOP languages, such as Simula and CLU, were much different and I can't find any reason to treat them like they are less "true" than Smalltalk. At this point anyway, I can't even think of OO as a coherent concept anymore : it's just a collection of language features that are implemented in much different ways across languages and that have often lots in common with languages that haven't been dubbed "OO", such as those supporting ADT without inheritance, and those supporting polymorphism without inheritance. The Self language doesn't have classes, and CLOS doesn't have data hiding nor a concept of "receiver", and they've been dubbed OO anyway.

128K is massive... my Jupiter Ace had 3K On our PDP-11/73 at college,, we had a line editor... until a kiddie from the second year showed us all how to switch it into full screen mode... nobody ever used command mode ever again. They taught us about Smalltalk VERY BRIEFLY in computer studies at school in 1982... it was a simplified language for teaching children, they told us... if only they'd had a clue. We had 2 amazingly stunning GUIs on the BBC Micro... but without a mouse: "The Music System" and "Fleet St. Editor"... they were both rather mind blowing.

Used to read your stuff in PC Plus! Seems like a long time ago 😀

Creating objects in any OOL is all about abstraction and not a whole lot more than that. You can catagorize and containerize in an abstract fashion.

Hi Huw. I have been using C++ for the past few years but I'm still not very comfortable with pointers. I'd appreciate it if you can recommend any book on pointers. Thanks

Where do you hand crank that thing?

How different/similar are smalltalk to simula?

Sometimes we hit a jackpot on youtube 😀

+1 for the importance of messaging. A GUI is a fine metaphor. Mouse clicks are messages to objects tied to screen features. I've always thought FORTH showed some glimmers of object programming because each "word" in FORTH consists of a reference to an interpreter and the word's body, which was a block of data. I would say that, though. I had wonderful opportunities working at New Micros, including writing the first version of MaxFORTH. There's a story behind the name, too, not widely known.

I got some books on smalltalk as well, with the same idea. The problem with object orientation in general is that programmers said something like: Programmer: I have 10 ways to program! Object guru: I have a method that is so revolutionary it will replace all that! Programmer: Thanks. I have 11 ways to program. ie., object dudes are a religion and want you to replace all of your programming methods.

"Even if you don't want to write real world programs in small talk. Just studying small talk and understanding its big ideas would really really help you to write better oriented programs in other languages". This is linda what is happening to Rust right now

Object Orientated programming is NEVER what you think it is 😂

Hi Huw, I’ve been writing code since 1982 (BASIC on a RML 380Z, running CP/M). Now write a lot of Pascal (Lazarus IDE), PHP and a version of C++ for my Arduino projects. Will definitely be following this series, looking forward to learning a few new wrinkles. Quite a novel concept for a 56 year old!! 😂😂

Did not Kodak do something very similar with the digital camera technology?

I'd like to download the paper you presented but I can't seem to find it anywhere. Mind dropping the link ?

Amiga was ahead of PCs with Workbench ...

3.1 was the real deal. Id love to have had small talk in windows over c++

I’ve only ever played with Smalltalk. But it spoiled me bad, it’s just a pleasure to program in! It holds your hand perfectly through TDD. It’s IDE features make every other language look bad… seriously how has nobody made a versions in other languages that work like Smalltalk? Edit: Typo

OOP is one of the best ideas programmers have ever been introduced to. The problem is, not too many know how to use it correctly.

Being of an age, I studied smalltalk and formal computational models like CSP and ACTORS in university. I've programmed in smalltalk and many other environments. So none of this came as a surprise. Smalltalk is nice in terms of language purity, but weak in terms of features you can use to get stuff done.

Well, my 1st (HOME-) Computer C64 (1984) with Datasette and ROM-BASIC was not enough for graphics programming, so I bought a C64 inside and learned about its graphics hardware and 6510 assembly language for graphic programming. My 2nd Computer became an ATARI 1024 ST (1987) which I used many years. My 1st OOP Language was Turbo Pascal v5.5 which I used for my engineering calculation software programming diplom thesis (1989/1990). Later when working on software development IBM compatible PCs an IBM compatible Pentium Windows 95 PC came into home (1997) followed later by Windows XP Multimedia PC (2003 for nearly 7 years) than replaced by affordable Notebook-PCs Windows VISTA (2007), Windows 7 and Windows 10. Until today I used several programming languages and sometimes one might be surprised what programming concept possibilities (like OOP) can be used in unlucky way, just to to avoid over-complicated or over-engineered...

Olivetti 24? LUXURY! Our first computer was an abacus made with conkers...

huh... i actually DO have 128gb of RAM. i play games n' stuff. how far we've come indeed.

I could tell it was a small talk browser a mile away😊

When you have Sun Java 1.0 in your bookcase and you see this title. 😂😂😂😂😂

I brought in and developed major Smalltalk applications for large corporations including headless ST on and IMB mainframe. Our team was never more productive, easily translating real-world business objects into ST objects. Learning Python now , it's disappointing to learn how inelegant and cryptic it is compared to how highly polished ST is. Bring back Smalltalk!

That definition of OOP sounds a lot like a description of REST.

Ok, this is very interesting and I'm certainly interested to learn more. But... This is a bit like pointing out that the modern usage of the word "meme" isn't what Dawkins meant when he coined it. Sure, that's true but ultimately it doesn't matter, OOP is what it has become. That caveat aside, I'm keen to learn more.

The OO programming has practically nothing to do with an asynchronous msg based systems, I say it more aligned with event driven programming. It requires a completely different skill and programming architecture. After nearly 35 years of programming I prefer a standard functional C programming as the easiest and fastest way to deliver applications. User interfaces are best written in Excel or some Windows environment, working off a common database. So nothing really changed 😕 for me at least, banking is very conservative.

Love❤ the part when he thinks he know what I think about object oriented programming. 😮

I remember reading the edition of "Byte" that was dedicated to Smalltalk, and thought it was an elaborate exercise in odd typography. I'm still not convinced that Object Orientation is more than a fashionable source of religious wars for programmers to fight. Smalltalk expertise has never been likely to get you a job or make money, and it still isn't,

Functional is the way to go

Omg BYTE my late Dad, RIP ha like every issue. We had a Timex sinclair zx81 and 1000 before Apple II C

My thoughts, for what very little they matter, are that all things should be in moderation, even moderation itself. So learn OOP, but don't abuse it. Out of all the things that a programmer should learn, there's really only one that I tell people to never use after they've learned it, and that's recursion. Learn it, learn to abuse it, learn to transform it, then never use it again.

man them floopy disks take me back to my school days playing on the good old BBC computers then our school upgraded to the old skool Macintosh lol seams like yesterday with the green screens.

Thats why i did it in blackboard attack detached

1:00 man these old machines have character to them!

Don't know what to think about it. I don't remember been so cheated. I thought you will make some point under 14m. I'm mad it's just a introduction to a whole series... on the other hand you got me interested a bit...

Just found your channel. Subbed!

the title is giving tom scott so hard

So you’re saying that Apple was onto something when making object Pascal the main language in Macintosh programmers workshop. Then subsequently again with the awful Objective-C which is smalltalk bolted onto C. Now they call Swift “Objective-C without the C” so isn’t it basically just a modern version of smalltalk??

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE !!!!! GGIVE THE LINK TO THE PAPER ON OOP SHOWN AT 0:23 IN THE VIDEO

This guy is so cool

Nice

I don't like a+b means something else than b+a.

Oop was simula, smalltalk, CLOS etc. There are a lot of different implementations, ye olde ways were better but still, in my opinion is not the holy grail abstraction or at least not the only good one. What i know is, its miles ahead of the current implementation of "class programming" and for sure at least in CLs case its methods granted it powers that are just starting to get some attention now (such as julia's multimethods)

blue's clues protagonist vibes

Modern programming STILL hasn't caught up with Smalltalk. At least not the version of it I was doing in the mid-90s. Source control with Git, for example, is sooo far behind what we were doing back then. At package management is a joke. IDEs are STILL not as simple and interactive as the Smalltalk envornment that was fully executable.

Great history lesson...but not really what was advertised

Miss those floppies!

3:43 jump the pre history

I agree, Smalltalk helps you understand OOP

I miss diskettes

Shame you don't use Pharo Smalltalk for this