History of Object Oriented Programing, by Casey Muratori (2025)

By Xah Lee. Date: 2025-12-19. Last updated: 2025-12-21.

2025-12-21

The Real History, of the Object Oriented Programing (a inheritance hierarchy of domain model. The worst damage to programing.)

Key figures:

Douglass T Ross. (created Automatically Programmed Tool. 1960).
Ivan Sutherland (Sketchpad. 1963. (Origin of Computer Aided Design System and Graphical User Interface))
Tony Hoare (computer scientist)
Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard (Simula. 1962)
Alan Kay (Smalltalk. 1972)
Bjarne Stroustrup (Cpp. 1985).

The primary culprit, that made an idea into cancer, is Bjarne Stroustrup with his C++ aka C with Classes.

Secondary crackpot, is Alan Kay.

Casey Muratori's talk, "The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake," critically examines the historical development and widespread adoption of object-oriented programming (OOP), specifically its emphasis on compile-time hierarchies that directly mirror real-world domain models.

He begins by introducing Looking Glass Studios and their game Thief: The Dark Project (1:22).
In 1998, Looking Glass developed what Muratori identifies as the first commercially released Entity Component System (ECS) (4:16).
This approach diverged from traditional OOP by organizing encapsulation boundaries around systems (like physics or combat) rather than around entities or objects themselves (5:11).
This highlights a fundamental difference in architectural thinking.

Muratori then frames what he considers the "big mistake" in OOP: the pervasive idea that software hierarchies should directly map to real-world domain models (10:05-11:12).
He presents historical evidence, citing Bjarne Stroustrup's early papers on C++ (11:47) and Alan Kay's work with Smalltalk (14:10), to demonstrate that this hierarchical, inheritance-heavy approach was indeed a core tenet of OOP's early promotion.
Both creators, he argues, initially advocated for deep inheritance structures that mimicked real-world classifications (12:29-13:01, 14:46-14:51).

He dives into Bjarne Stroustrup's personal journey, explaining that Stroustrup's motivation for creating C with Classes (later C++) stemmed from his experience simulating distributed systems in Simula (17:44).
While Simula's class concept initially seemed beneficial for direct domain mapping, Stroustrup faced significant practical issues like slow compile times and inefficient garbage collection (22:50-24:12).
This led him to rewrite his simulations in BCPL, a language with minimal type checking (24:27-24:41).
Muratori emphasizes that Stroustrup's subsequent design of C++ was driven by his personal need for type protection, error checking, and runtime efficiency (25:56-27:59), not initially for large-team collaboration (25:01-25:56).
He also notes that Stroustrup used inheritance for code reuse early on, a practice he later advised against in favor of templates (29:00-30:35).

Finally, Muratori traces the origin of the class concept back to Simula, developed by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard at the Norwegian Computing Center in 1962 (32:06-33:14).
Simula was designed as a simulation language for "operations research" (33:28), which involves optimizing system behaviors.
The class concept was a natural fit for modeling discrete processes in simulations.