[Jtsummers]

It's a remarkable stretch to go from those words to "OO was created for working with teams." It is neither implicit nor explicit in the talk and I don't know why anyone would make the claim you are making.

EDIT: You seem to be conflating the two ideas still. OO being created for teams is a different claim than it being good for teams. At most, you could stretch Steele's talk to the second, but not to the first.

[db48x]

True, he doesn't come right out and say the words. But don’t lose sight of the context. This is the big Keynote speech at a conference called OOPSLA, or “Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications”, in 1998. It is safe to say that the audience has heard of Java by now. They already know that the core language design choice made during the creation of Java was to make it object—oriented. Objets are everything and everywhere in Java. Even the simplest “Hello World” program in Java has to be written as a class with a a Main method.

This talk tells us why he and the others at Sun made that choice. He says right there that he wants Java to enable people to write large programs. He specifically contrasts it with the small languages and small programs of the past, the kind that were invariably written by individuals or small teams.

This is what he believes OOP is good for, and why researchers have been studying it for so long. He is reinforcing the belief of the attendees that OOP in general, and languages like Java specifically, are a panacea created for the explicit purpose of letting engineers work more efficiently together on large, complex systems.

We know from the historical record that early researchers did not have this belief. We know that many practitioners of the 90s and 2000s did. This talk may not be the genesis of that belief, but it is proximate to it.

[bigbuppo]

The fault for this myth will almost certainly be marketing. The best place to look probably won't be something for those in the trenches, but more targeted at management types.

[igouy]

I've listen'd to just past:

24:50 -- "A lot of people talk about these things. They talk about those compile time hierarchies and all that sort-of stuff; and they say - like you know, here's the thing that you just don't understand, it's all about large teams …"

Is there some example that you can point me towards, where a lot of people are saying compile time hierarchies are all about large teams?

(I suppose Ada is an example of design for programming-in-the-large.)