a history of dark OOP from Casey Muratori

[Jason E. Aten]

This is a great two hour talk on the history of dark object oriented programming

implementation patterns and how eventually the 

Entity-Component-System[1] approach popular in games 

was rediscovered/re-evolved.  

"Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake"

Better Software Conference, 2025 July 17

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI

He gives some history of Simula, Algol, Hoare on Records, Stroustroup

on C with Classes' design, and the little known Douglas T. Ross 

of the MIT Servomechanisms Lab[2] who first discussed structs, 

tagged unions, and vtables in the 1950s.

Muratori shows that aspects that ECS enables -- like constraint 

optimization -- were in use in even very early graphics systems 

like Sketchpad (Ivan Sutherland, 1963).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_T._Ross

I particularly enjoyed the heuristic he derives at the end in the

Q/A conversation with Ryan Fleury after the talk. He argues

for designing to help solve the hardest problems, rather than 

restricting mechanism to only the simplest challenges.