I enjoyed listening to this talk. In many ways I was aware of the history of OOP but its great to see it in more detail with quotes from known names, etc.
I also appreciate the shoutout to Looking Glass Studios and their Thief: the dark project game. I LOVED this game when it came out. Obviously the programmer inside appreciates Thief for its overall design as well.
Around 2005 I had to make a graphical shop floor on the web and all product on shelves, etc. Trying to do this in HTML4 with different browsers was a pain, and mostly written in Javascript. During my later time in the project I started to get a feel for AJAX and I wanted to move all my javascript into a library (backend) so I could do more than just an HTML interface. I was thinking OpenGL and other methods or even networking where multiple people could do things together. I started re-writing a VB.NET version of this javascript library and I could not get past the initial design.
Remember i'm technically still a junior developer. I was designing the project "the right way" with OOP - inheritence, overrides, etc. It "looked nice" when you view my OOP as a diagram. It starts off well but when you go down the rabbit hole as well as new features it starts to get bloated and messy.
In the end I thought about games I was writing in C and viewed what I was doing in a game-like way. I ended up creating each "item" with a unique Id (index) and a bunch of "features" that link to the "item" Id.
This way, when rendering, I just look each "feature" update and re-render. It was working suprisingly well. I could then, for each customer using this product, could have their own XML file to store each "object" which was simply an "item" with "features"
Obviously, this is all before I had heard of Entity Component Systems (ECS) or Data-oriented Design, and other names.
I still treasure that project to this very day as a pure success story. I was porting it over to C# before I decided to leave around 2009. If the pay was better, I could still be working for them today (assuming I get more pay increase as the years passed)
It is a reminder that OOP is not be-all-end-all solution.
I also appreciate the shoutout to Looking Glass Studios and their Thief: the dark project game. I LOVED this game when it came out. Obviously the programmer inside appreciates Thief for its overall design as well.
Around 2005 I had to make a graphical shop floor on the web and all product on shelves, etc. Trying to do this in HTML4 with different browsers was a pain, and mostly written in Javascript. During my later time in the project I started to get a feel for AJAX and I wanted to move all my javascript into a library (backend) so I could do more than just an HTML interface. I was thinking OpenGL and other methods or even networking where multiple people could do things together. I started re-writing a VB.NET version of this javascript library and I could not get past the initial design.
Remember i'm technically still a junior developer. I was designing the project "the right way" with OOP - inheritence, overrides, etc. It "looked nice" when you view my OOP as a diagram. It starts off well but when you go down the rabbit hole as well as new features it starts to get bloated and messy.
In the end I thought about games I was writing in C and viewed what I was doing in a game-like way. I ended up creating each "item" with a unique Id (index) and a bunch of "features" that link to the "item" Id.
This way, when rendering, I just look each "feature" update and re-render. It was working suprisingly well. I could then, for each customer using this product, could have their own XML file to store each "object" which was simply an "item" with "features"
Obviously, this is all before I had heard of Entity Component Systems (ECS) or Data-oriented Design, and other names.
I still treasure that project to this very day as a pure success story. I was porting it over to C# before I decided to leave around 2009. If the pay was better, I could still be working for them today (assuming I get more pay increase as the years passed)
It is a reminder that OOP is not be-all-end-all solution.