object-oriented programming

A long recorded seminar in which Alan Kay discusses object-oriented programming, probably from the mid-1980s. He covers the original idea of objects, messaging and the work done at Xerox.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) gives a talk on the SOLID principles of object-oriented and agile design, in the context of encapsulation and clean code.

Casey Muratori's two-hour talk tracing the history of object-oriented programming back to the 1960s and examining how its ideas, and later entity component systems, came about. It is followed by a Q&A.

Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote, preserved on YouTube after being lost from Google Video. He discusses what object orientation was meant to be, messaging, system design, and the state of computing practice.

Kevlin Henney revisits structured programming, from Go To Statement Considered Harmful to block-structured code and object orientation. He argues it still matters for how we write code today.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) traces the history of software from 1948 to today, looking at the problems programmers faced, how they were solved, and what mistakes the profession made. He then projects where the field is going, including professionalism and regulation.

Mike Acton of Insomniac Games argues that a program's purpose is transforming data, and shows how common C++ approaches work against that in performance-critical game development. He covers cache behavior, data layout and the limits of compilers.

Kevlin Henney argues that procedural programming never went away despite later paradigms such as OO and functional. He traces the history of structured programming and shows where procedural thinking still lives in modern code and why it matters for readability.

Sean Parent of Adobe argues that object-oriented frameworks ultimately fail to deliver scalable, high quality software and proposes combining generic and declarative programming instead. It draws on Stepanov's Elements of Programming.

A live-coded demo by Jonathan Blow showing how to get object-system-style expressiveness in a data-oriented way, covering structure-of-arrays layouts and composition. It shows features of his Jai language that make programs fast.

James Gosling gives a personal talk at the 50th anniversary seminar of Simula about using the language from 1974 and how it shaped his thinking. He explains how Simula's object model and coroutines influenced the design of Java.

Raph Levien presents his new Rust GUI framework, built on data-oriented design and ideas from entity component systems, for the Xi editor. He weighs the approach against alternatives and discusses pros and cons.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, interviews Alan Kay at Code Mesh. They discuss the meaning of object orientation, message passing, the META II paper, and the state of computer science.

Tef's EMF 2012 talk on lessons from a career in programming, a candid and humorous look at why programming is so often terrible. Slides and a draft script are available online.

A CppCon 2018 talk arguing that OOP has failed to deliver on reuse and performance, and presenting data-oriented design for C++ with practical worked examples from real systems.

Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote argues that the computer revolution has not really happened yet, reflecting on how computing, objects and the web fall short of their potential.

Jonathan Blow's Reboot Develop 2017 talk on making game programming less terrible, discussing software bloat, slowness and the design goals behind his own programming language.

A panel from the Lang NEXT 2014 conference on systems programming in 2014 and beyond. Language designers including Bjarne Stroustrup and Rob Pike discuss the topic, including C++ header compile times.

Rich Hickey's talk on time, state, identity and values, arguing that mutable object-oriented modeling fits the world poorly. It lays out the thinking behind Clojure's approach to data and change.

Alan Kay argues for rethinking how computer science is taught in schools, drawing on his work on object-oriented programming and GUIs. He discusses how poorly people understand complex systems and what education could do about it.

A SXSW talk by W Watson that uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, with nods to Zizek, to critique popular programming languages. It argues that people choose and defend languages for emotional and ideological reasons rather than rational ones.

Brian Kernighan's 2009 talk at Princeton on the Elements of Programming Style, discussing readable code, avoiding cleverness and flawed examples in programming tutorials.

Rich Hickey's talk at Clojure's tenth anniversary on the kind of programs Clojure is designed for. He argues for situated programs that deal with changing requirements, and for dynamic typing and data over static types.

Mark Seemann argues that functional programming naturally yields many of the best practices object-oriented developers learn painfully. He shows how functional architecture leads to a pit of success, with a pure core and impure shell.

Luca Sas's ACCU 2021 talk on Modern C, a style of C and C-like C++ aligned with data-oriented design. It covers centralized memory management, zero-is-initialization, error handling and API design.

Guy Steele's Strange Loop 2010 talk argues that programmers should not have to think about parallelism, and that languages should support algorithms built on independence and divide-and-conquer. He also recounts fitting a program onto a single punch card.

Douglas Crockford's YUIConf 2011 keynote on why programming style matters, particularly in JavaScript. He draws on science about the brain and shows how tools like JSLint help.

A 92-minute RMIT University seminar in which Ken Stanley argues that setting an objective can block achieving it. He presents objective-less, novelty-driven search as an alternative approach to innovation and discovery, drawing on evolutionary computation.

Rafal Dittwald's Clojure/north talk shows how to move from writing Java-style code in Clojure to thinking in data-driven, functional terms. He walks through a JavaScript example, refactoring imperative code step by step into a functional core.

Eskil Steenberg's two-hour talk on his personal approach to writing C, covering code style, structure, naming, pointers and large-project organization. He warns it contains a fair bit of programming religion.

Douglas Crockford's first Yahoo lecture puts JavaScript in historical context. He traces the language's structure and quirks back through the early decades of computer science and programming language history.

Jonathan Blow's first talk on designing a new programming language for games, which became Jai. He explains the problems with C++ and why Go, Rust and D do not fit game development.

Gabriel Lebec's Fullstack Academy talk introduces lambda calculus syntax, the history of mathematical logic, and the essence of functional programming using JavaScript. It also covers combinators, currying and Church encodings.

Bryan Cantrill of Joyent presents Manta, an internet-facing object store that lets you run compute directly on the data. The talk is peppered with ZFS history and Cantrill's trademark commentary on the industry.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

John Carmack's roughly three-hour QuakeCon 2013 keynote, delivered from a few bullet points. Topics include his Haskell experiments with functional programming and static typing, game state, and cloud gaming.

Jon Purdy's Stanford EE380 seminar giving an overview of concatenative programming, from function composition theory and history down to low-level implementation and correctness benefits.

A five-hour Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack covering Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, programming, games and rockets.

Lex Fridman's long podcast conversation with Chris Lattner, creator of Swift, LLVM and MLIR and co-founder of Modular. Topics include the Mojo language, the future of programming and AI, and hardware.

Jonathan Blow's LambdaConf 2025 keynote demonstrates the Jai programming language and explains its design. It includes demos of metaprogramming and tools that visualize programs.