Alan Kay on the Meaning of “Object-Oriented Programming” (2003)
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2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderI still don't really understand what the big idea of message passing compared to a method call is. Is it supposed to be asynchronous? It never seems to be so in practice. It it supposed to be remotable? So are method calls. Are languages like Objective C and Ruby message passing to some extent? Why is that message passing rather than a method call? What's the essential difference? Is Java message passing?
A lot of the recent trend towards OOP-bashing comes from bad implementations of OOP, just as bashing design patterns is more to do with badly thought out architectures and overuse of those patterns. In fact, the origins of OOP are basically what we would now call microservice architecture (CSP-inspired languages like Go being a specialisation of this). Each service can be as stateless or as stateful as it needs to be (without shared state) and services should be loosely coupled…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 514
- Total comments
- 347
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-11-30 | Alan Kay on the Meaning of “Object-Oriented Programming” (2003)First breakout | siteshwar | 117 | 55 |
| 2018-04-14 | Dr. Alan Kay on the Meaning of Object-Oriented Programming (2003) | jpamata | 2 | 0 |
| 2019-03-17 | Alan Kay on the Meaning of “Object-Oriented Programming” (2003)Best thread · Latest 20+ point return | tosh | 395 | 292 |