It was around this time that I first started to get generally irritated with the quality of instructional and tutorial materials in #programming.

Now I need to stress that not all programming and #computing books which I encountered in the 1990s and early 2000s were rubbish. I remember especially liking the textbooks I got to use in my elective #AI classes: Russell and Norvig's AI text (q.v. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Modern_Approach) and Guy Steele's text on Common Lisp. These books mostly fit my idea of what a good, uncomplicating, unconfusing textbook ought to be like: dense with information, stolid and even plodding in the sequential presentment of topics and subtopics, illustrated in a spare and concise fashion without lots of splashy colors or graphic arts meant to impress rather than inform.

But as the 1990s progressed and computer programming became more faddish and hyped as the future of education—touted as a skill more necessary to learn than any other—I noticed how texts on programming topics were getting fluffier, less rigorous, more likely to feel like sales brochures, especially when it came to #OOP.

[5/???]

Anyway, after I finally got booted from Caltech (quite deservedly I assure you, even if the process was hastened by mostly terrible teaching and a hideously toxic student culture) I took up #programming in earnest with the help of SDSU because I was wretched at autodidactism (self-teaching) and thus welcomed being forced along by a definite curriculum and class schedule. In earlier years I'd worked with BASIC and Pascal, but now I was put onto C and C++ mostly, ornamented by Common Lisp and Java, and I got my first exposure to "object orientation", at least of the Java / C++ sort. (I made very little use of the CLOS in Lisp; I don't recall that it ever felt necessary for the exercises in #artificial_intelligence which I did at SDSU.)

I'm struggling to remember what I was taught about #OOP. I recall at least that it was very heavily sold, and when I finally got work as a programmer, I was frequently dealing with "objects". Heck I worked for a time at a San Diego firm that sold an implementation of CORBA, an "object request broker" that permits calling methods on remote or distributed objects. Does CORBA get used for anything these days? I haven't heard the name in years and years.

[4/???]

There's no shortage of "object oriented programming is bad" hot takes online, written or delivered by people who have incomparably more #programming experience than myself and who thus might have far better reasoned objections to the paradigm. Complicating the picture is that the two #OOP languages I learned to use in my education, C++ and Java, might simply be bad languages and thus a poor basis for rejecting the OOP paradigm outright. Maybe if I'd learned Smalltalk or Objective C in the 1990s instead, I'd be talking differently right now.

What especially annoyed me about OOP, at least with C++ and Java, was that it seemed superficially intuitive—all the tutorial writings on OOP love to emphasize how "natural" the paradigm supposedly is, attuned to how human beings purportedly conceive of physical objects—and yet in practice, it seemed to lead me into a confusing morass of object hierarchies and agonizing over interrelationships with an ever-multiplying population of classes. So often it seemed like I needed to define clumsy workarounds to the inflexibility imposed by just those features of the language touted as advantageous for "object orientation".

Not all the SDSU CompSci classes were completely valueless, I will admit, and at least being in that degree program allowed me to meet sci-fi writer (now departed) Vernor Vinge, who signed my copy of A Fire upon the Deep (which I eventually lost somewhere between moves). I took elective classes in #artificial_intelligence and learned some Common Lisp. But most of what I remember of the #compsci curriculum at SDSU in the 1990s was rather faddish, and I expect that's typical of most such curricula. I wasn't getting a well-structured and rigorous academic discipline; I was getting a collection of vocational exercises, learning how to use #programming tools that happened to be popular at the time. So I ended up doing a lot of C++ homework, and in my last term (when I hurriedly took a bunch of CS classes I'd been putting off because I was putting far more effort into my Classics curriculum) I had to do #Java homework, for a required "object-oriented programming" class.

Ah, #OOP. The very acronym suggests a blunder.