OOP is Not What You Think It Is Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) has become one of the most popular paradigms in modern software development, yet it’s often misunderstood. When most people hear “OOP,” they think of classes, inheritance, and the rigid hierarchy of objects—features that languages like C++ and Java have made standard. But this wasn’t the original vision.
The roots of OOP lie in the groundbreaking work of Alan Kay, who introduced the world to the concept in the 1970s through the creation of Smalltalk. For Kay, OOP wasn’t about objects in the way we think of them today—it was about message passing, a way for software components to communicate seamlessly without getting bogged down by the internal structure. In this vision, objects were secondary to the messages they exchanged, which encouraged flexibility, modularity, and dynamic behavior.
Smalltalk: A Different Kind of OOP Smalltalk wasn’t just a programming language—it was a philosophy. Unlike C++ and other modern OOP languages that focus on complex class hierarchies, Smalltalk treated objects as living entities capable of sending and receiving messages. This idea of message passing was central, allowing objects to respond in ways that weren’t strictly predefined. The focus was on behavior over structure, encouraging experimentation and evolution within a system.