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

What is Object Orientation all about? That’s what this series hopes to explain. In this introductory episode, I take a look back at the history of object oriented programming and give you some guidance on the free software and book you’ll need to get the most from this series.

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DOWNLOAD LINKS

The Smalltalk/V Tutorial
or:

Squeak Smalltalk

Books on Smalltalk Programming

WHO IS HUW COLLINGBOURNE?

I’ve been programming since the early 1980s. I’ve written wrote programming columns on Java, C#, Delphi and other languages for “PC Plus Magazine”, “Computer Shopper” and numerous other UK magazines. I wrote the cult adventure game, The Golden Wombat Of Destiny, I have developed programming tools with SapphireSteel Software and I have written programming books published by Dark Neon and No Starch Press. These include books on programming C, C#, Java, Ruby, Delphi and Object Pascal, pointers, recursion and programming adventure games.
Find them all my books on Amazon.

Keep in Touch
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Code With Huw on Facebook:

[JamesJones-ztyx]

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

[henrykkaufman]

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!

[MikaelIsaksson]

"Back in 87... this was cutting edge hardware" ... Amiga: "Am I nothing?"... Also, the Amiga had mouse, windows, menus, icons, proper editors and the list goes on. Amazing computer for it's time, really ahead of the curve.

[rolfstinner]

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

[ChrisPinCornwall]

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.

[bigmjolnir]

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.

[ronniebasak]

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

[MartinKrogh]

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...

[Whoislorns]

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”) 😅

[juanmacias]

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

[durrcodurr]

Don't forget about Atari ST and Amiga computers which were much more affordable than Macs or PCs and actually paved the way for large-scale adoption of GUI technology.

[emjizone]

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

[DeadDemosthenes]

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!

[chrisBruner]

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.

[MadsonOnTheWeb]

"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

[cvsfkj]

love object oriented programming, wish it was real.

[dragonwood]

My first computer was a Commodore 64. It had a magnetic tape drive. It took about 5 minutes to boot. It came with a book about how to program it. I tried following the lessons, but I was only 10 and didn't have the patience to do more than the first lesson. I wish I had stuck with it.

[SverreA.Larssen]

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.

[adrianstephens]

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.

[julianbrown]

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