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Comment by LandR | Hacker News Reader

> I have a ton of respect for Alan Kay and think he's a genius. But why does it seem like every time he talks about OO it's always painting an apocalyptic picture like we're in some kind of twilight zone alternate nightmare reality of broken patterns and models?

Because we are? Have you seen most OOP code-bases, they are a train wreck!

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Could you elaborate on the “most” part? Coming from my experience on Rails over the past couple of years, I’m quite happy with what I’ve found so far.

Well, Ruby is Smalltalk with a different syntax..

I think one of the biggest issues is that languages such as Java account for large percentages of existing OOP in the wild and Java is a "kitchen sink" language with too many supported paradigms and styles.

For example, look at class attributes and methods. I'm not sure they're needed but in a language like Java the semantics often leads to wildly different programming styles within the same code base. And it's hard to enforce consistent styles using conventions.

That said, I've seen/read Kay asked directly, on more than one occasion to elaborate on his notion of a real OOP language implementation and his answers are always to coy and slippery for my taste.

JavaScript is functional and oh boy!

What does "functional" mean to you? If "OO" has a hundred different meanings, then "functional" must have at least a thousand. To me, JavaScript is definitely not functional - it lacks a notion of purity, and its meaning is the evaluation of statements, not the construction of expressions.

My point was popular languages attract masses of developers and the resulting quality of code is poor on average.

That's a good point, but it's not implied by "JavaScript is functional and oh boy!" at all.

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