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

Why HN readers recommended it

HN commenters recommend it for its source-based history of OOP, though some dispute its account of Alan Kay.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Better Software Conference

Topic

history of object-oriented programming

Format

talk

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

11

HN mentions in dataset

16

Recommendation years in dataset

2025–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• 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 …

• 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 …

• I found this talk to be great. It goes through the history of OOP and how some of the ideas for the more modern ECS were embedded in the culture at the formation of OOP in the 1960s to 1980s but somehow weren't adopted. It …