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by dragochat 40 days ago
your "physics" grounding is exactly why it feels so odd - software is by its nature anti-physicalist

math and logic are closer to a basis for software abstraction - but they were scary to business people so a "fake language" was invented atop them - you have "objects" that don't actually exist as objects, they are just "type based dispatch/selection mechanism for functions", "classes" that are firstly "producers of things and holders of common implementation" and only secondarily also work to "group together classes of objects"
2 comments
jeltz 40 days ago
I feel that is a bit of a false history. OOP was invented by people trying to simulate physical systems, e.g. Stroustup, the Simula people and their contemporaries not business people. Arguably it was popularized later by business people and enterprise Java developers. But that happened way later.

I do not think OOP ever really worked out well as can be evidenced by it no longer being as popular and people having almost entirely abandoned "Cat > Animal > Object" inheritance hierarchies.

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9rx 40 days ago
This is also a bit of a false history. OOP was squarely invented with Smalltalk. The term was literally conceived for Smalltalk to describe its unique (at the time) programming model. While objects most certainly predate Smalltalk, it was Smalltalk that first started exploring how objects could be oriented.

OOP didn't really take off either, but mostly because it is hard to optimize and impossible to type.

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jeltz 34 days ago
I will have to just disagree with you here. Simula had OOP before Smalltalk existed and both Smalltalk and later C++ arose out of Simula.
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igouy 34 days ago
fwiw "This paper has described ThingLab, a simulation laboratory."

https://worrydream.com/refs/Borning_1981_-_The_Programming_L...

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