Casey Muratori on his "The Big OOPs" Talk

Casey Muratori (0:00)

The reason that I kind of split on the OOP thing and the FP thing, where I'm like, I really just think OOP should kind of just go away completely, whereas FP, I actually kind of really like, is it's because of what I think it does to a programmer's brain, right? That's actually the part that I care about. I find myself not only enjoying, but being well-benefited to thinking about my code in terms of purely functional things from time to time. It is a good mode for me to think in, right? Like my code benefits from me switching into a functional mindset now and again.

And so I see its benefits clearly. Like they don't need to be sold to me. It's obvious when I'm doing it. Object-oriented, I never find myself wanting to think that way.

Richard Feldman (0:50)

Welcome to Software Unscripted. I'm your host, Richard Feldman. Today I'm talking with Casey Muratori, creator of the Handmade Hero series, where he makes a game from scratch in plain sea with no dependencies. Also creator of the Performance Aware Programming series, which I've been a subscriber to for a long time and I'm a big fan of. And finally, most recently, creator of the talk, The Big OOPs, Anatomy of a 35 Year Mistake from Better Software Conference 2025 We talk about that talk where he gives about a two hour long deep dive into the history of some of programming's most foundational concepts, as well as all sorts of other topics, ranging from architecture to where to draw module boundaries, and even things like Windows and what's going on with its development. I want to give a huge thank you to everyone who's been supporting Software Unscripted on Patreon. If you'd like to become a subscriber, check out patreon.com/softwareunscripted.

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All right, Casey, welcome back.

Casey Muratori (2:09)

It's great to be here. I haven't seen you in a while.

Richard Feldman (2:12)

Yeah.

Last time we had only audio and now we got video. Very exciting. As we were talking about earlier, it works flawlessly and there's no video recording problems whatsoever. Oh yeah, there'll be no problems with this.

Casey Muratori (2:23)

It's going to be great. Don't worry. The software is flawless.

Richard Feldman (2:25)

It's super high quality. But anyway, so yeah, we were talking about how you gave this awesome talk, super deep dive, like two hours of talk, followed by another 30 minutes of Q&A, something like that at the Better Software Conference.

Casey Muratori (2:40)

Something like that.

Richard Feldman (2:41)

Yeah. You really went into a lot of detail on the history of where things come from in programming. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, I think the original motivation was sort of dive into where object-oriented programming comes from. And then it's sort of, you kept going down the rabbit hole every time you found a new thread to pull on, you pulled on it. Yeah.

And you got all the way down to, yeah, structs.

Casey Muratori (3:02)

Yeah, like, I didn't feel like, so there's two separate paths that you could explore, right? And I was exploring one in particular. So one path is why did object-oriented programming as a concept get popularized, right? Like, why was it adopted? And I didn't go, I didn't look at that, right? So I didn't look at, like, you know, I mean, you would have a bunch of stuff you'd look at there, like, you know, Sun's big marketing push for Java and things like that. All of those would have been important things to cover if you were looking for, like, why did this get adopted?

But I was more interested in the, like, why did anyone start to think about some of these concepts in the first place, right? Because if you think about some of the things that ride along with Static Typing, like, you could, you could have just had people talk about, like, functional decomposition and stuff, or, like, we want to kind of have bundles of parameters or stuff like that that we pass around. But they, like, very specifically right out of the gate, we're like, we're going to have class hierarchies and they're going to have virtual functions. And also, by the way, we're not going to allow functional decomposition with switch statements, right? So, like, that was early on and that was being pushed as, like, part and parcel with any other concept of artificial programming.