Object-Oriented Anarchism

Agents, institutions, groups, classes, state, and information-processing

From biology, to computers, to new self-organization paradigms

Rodrtigo Tello

Last update: July 2023

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Small history of Object-oriented programming

The term Object-Oriented Programming was coined by computer scientist and researcher Alan Kay. With a background in mathematics and molecular biology, Kay has said how he took the idea of having individual smaller units, that are self-contained and that are as powerful as the whole. Every "object" is an organism. Every instance within the computer is its' own computer, encapsulating as much or as little complexity as it neads to be. For context, the previous computing paradigms treated information processing and computing closer to what algebra is or a calculator, where you are manipulating information directly. In kay's vision "everything is an object" which means that there's no other low-level semantic for what the computer is, since everything is an object: numbers, subroutines, events, data, classes, routines. The first computer system where these ideas were manifested was Smalltalk, which Alan Kay has written full descriptive retrospectives already.

Probably one of the biggest failures in OOP, Smalltalk and Kay's general vision of computing was in the naming. Both the general. Kay's has stated in later talks that he should have emphasized the "message", "messaging" and the "space in between" (what "the Japanese called ma-h"). Samantha John [cite her from Future of Coding], software engineer, computer-interface researcher, and founder of the programming evnrionment Hopscotch, has said that what they probably meant by objects was "computers".

When I say object what I really mean is probably agent.

Yásnaya Gil, linguist, activist and member of Mixe communities, has expressed how the act of organizing - as in self-organizing - as one of the most if not the most powerful act of resciliance, resistance and world-building.