Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025

Don't let the title mislead you into thinking this is a polemic—it's an excellent talk that traces the lineage of object-oriented programming (which goes back way further than you might imagine) and helps elucidate why it became such a dysfunctional pattern. It's really well-researched, citing a bunch of primary sources, and the speaker is clear and engaging. Never would have thought a nearly 2 hour lecture^[There's about ~35 minutes of Q&A, hence the runtime] on OOP would engender such rapt attention—there are so many fascinating tidbits that were dug up from ancient academic papers.

So much of computing is about the newest and shiniest thing that it's easy to lose sight of how—and importantly, why—we got here, and I think reexamining these foundations can help prevent us from propagating the mistakes of the past.