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Comment by 0xpgm | Hacker News Reader

Also, even though it called itself purely object-oriented, the earlier versions lacked inheritance.

Nowadays object oriented programming is almost entirely associated with inheritance hierarchies.

Perhaps inheritance isn't as central to object oriented programming as initially envisioned.

It isn't, the haters are the ones that don't get that there are many OOP flavours, mostly they only learnt one way and naturally everything is like that.

The original VB and Self are two other well known examples where there is no inheritance support.

Also most Lisp systems inspired in The Art of Metaobject Protocol tend to focus on multi-methods, instead of inheritance, to change current behaviours attached to structs.

Self has inheritance, using it far more pervasively than Smalltalk, and the original VB isn't OO.

Some prototype based languages use delegation instead of inheritance, so people assume that is the case for Self as well. The difference is subtle. But as you pointed out and Mario Wolczko said: "Self is like Smalltalk, only more so". There were also languages with neither inheritance nor delegation but that still included some scheme for sharing.

Prototype based inheritance is another matter.

Original VB was definitely OOP, especially since VB 4, when VBX was replaced by COM.

I sometimes "hate", exactly because of people having learned one flavour of OOP, usually the Java flavor of "everthing must be a class" and trying to shoehorn everything into that style of programming, insisting that inheritance must be had, even though many people have already learned the lesson of composition over inheritance, and even though one of the most popular newer languages, Rust, doesn't even have inheritance or classes. Also the "mutate everything from everywhere, as long as I have a setter"-style.

That dogmatic Java-flavor-OOP and their ideas of translating design patterns 1-to-1 to other languages like Python, disregarding the language specifics and language design choices ... ugh, such a PITA.

That's where my guards are going up, and I start observing very closely, what that person's understanding of OOP is, and whether they merely throw out buzzwords, or actually know something about what they are talking about.

I suppose this goes back to the disambiguation of the term since Alan Kay coined it.

https://wiki.c2.com/?AlanKaysDefinitionOfObjectOriented

When using so called OOP languages I specifically avoid inheritance, and in fact I think it's the worst aspect of it. In any case, I tend not to include inheritance into the definition of object orientation.

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