this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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[–] ZomieChicken@sh.itjust.works 24 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Or do as Alan Kay wants and start calling it "Message-Oriented Programming".

"I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is "messaging"."

https://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-October/017019.html

[–] presoak@lazysoci.al 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

I skimmed that.

So you've got a bunch of message transceivers (aka objects). And the magic is in the message soup.

Yes?

[–] ZomieChicken@sh.itjust.works 1 points 32 minutes ago

From my understanding, yes. Personally, I've seen so many different definitions of "OOP" (most of which were incoherent), I developed my own definition of what an 'object' is, and just go on with life.

[–] entwine@programming.dev 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I still get sad when I think about Objective C and how it didn't take off vs C++ just because it had ugly syntax (which becomes beautiful once you understand why it is the way it is)

[–] bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I’m still mad at Apple for making Swift instead of Objective-C 3.0. It was such a powerful and small language.

C++ has a billion features and Swift is getting more every year.

Objective-C was fast to compile, great in a debugger, and allowed lots of creativity and patching broken system components.

Lots of great software was written with it. CocoaBindings are magical.

[–] plyth@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] entwine@programming.dev 5 points 1 day ago

Both C++ and Objective-C aimed to be "C with classes". C++ does it by hijacking existing syntax (struct), Objective-C does it by adding new syntax, while leaving the original minimalism of C untouched.

In fact, it's a strict superset of C, which means it doesn't change anything at all in C, it only appends. So every valid C program is a valid Objective C program (which is not true for C++).

You know how some C programs are valid C++ programs though? Well, those same programs can use Objective C features too, meaning you're able to use them in C++... Meaning you're able to code in "Objective C++" (which is very common for interop purposes)