Object thinking

What Hacker News says

1. projectileboyAug 2026
   A good book for appreciating the OO mindset is Object Thinking by David West.
   thread
2. omnibrainAug 2026
   "Object thinking" by David West was eye opening about this back in the day. The gist is to model the objects not along the line of real world entities, but along the line of "behaviour" like you mention.
   thread
3. KerrickMar 2025
   Read books. Like, a lot of them.

   Start with Make It Stick (Brown et al.). Apply what this book teaches you to every one afterwards.

   Next, read and work through Exercises for Programmers (Hogan) and A Common Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms (Wengrow).

   After you finish those two, read The Missing README (Riccomini et al.) and Extreme Programming Explained (Beck et al.). These two books provide very different viewpoints into the stuff that isn’t coding in a programming job.

   Assuming you’re using an OO language, follow that up with Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications (Booch et al.) and Object Thinking. They contrast each other quite a bit; having both perspectives is handy.

   Once you’re through all those, I recommend Tidy First (Beck), Implementation Patterns (Beck), and Test-Driven Development By Example (Beck). These three books of his provide an incredibly accessible view into better ways to code.

   If you’re anything like me you get bored reading one book for too long. I’ve found that having a second book going that I can switch to is great for that. A parallel track with The Pattern On the Stone (Hillis), The Pragmatic Programmer (Thomas & Hunt), The Mythical Man-Month (Brooks), and How Computers Really Work (Justice) provides a reprieve and some technical and cultural context.

   Show morethread
4. KerrickFeb 2025
   We have a disagreement about the core of OOP. In English, a simple sentence like "The cat eats the rat" can be broken down as follows:

   - Cat is the subject noun

   - Eats is the verb

   - Rat is the object noun

   In object-oriented programming, the subject is most often the programmer, the program, the computer, the user agent, or the user. The object is... the object. The verb is the method.

   So, imagine the sentence "the customer canceled the order."

   - Customer is the subject noun

   - Canceled is the verb

   - Order is the object noun

   In OOP style you do not express this as customer.cancel(order) even though that reads aloud left-to-right similarly to English. Instead, you orient the expression around the object. The order is the object noun, and is what is being canceled. Thus, order.cancel(). The subject noun is left implicit, because it is redundant. Nearly every subject noun in a given method (or even system) will be the same programmer, program, computer, user agent, or user.

   For additional perspectives, I recommend reading Part I of "Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications" (3rd edition) by Grady Booch et. al, and "Object Thinking" by David West.

   ---

   That said, I think you're right about the single responsibility principle in this example. A class with too many behaviors should usually be decomposed into multiple classes, with the responsibilities distributed appropriately. However, the object should not be left behavior-less. It must still be an anthropomorphized object that encapsulates whatever data it owns with behavior.

   Show morethread
5. bkghMay 2023
   Read this book: Object Thinking, David West
   thread
6. rileyphoneJan 2023
   I had a similar shift in perspective recently, that went from viewing objects from the outside as things to be manipulated, to viewing them from within as independent entities with boundaries. What made it click for me was watching Alan Kay talks and reading “Object Thinking” by David West. Now, I think the idea is due for some sort of renaissance. Though the culture of programming has turned against it in favor of FP, OOP continues to underlie the most important languages, organizations, and products in a way that speaks to its ultimate potential: to build evolvable, growable, maintainable software systems in service of human flourishing.
   Show morethread