In AI — Object Oriented Principles Still Rules
Using AI for programming is great and can improve your productivity by 100x! BUT understanding OOP is still the one unique skill you must lean and understand to get the best out of AI.
I am one of the “lucky ones”, I learned it the hard way with C and later C++ studying (I am Danish and Bjarne Stroustrup and his C++ books was mandatory!) and I later programmed in Smalltalk for several years.
Smalltalk is considered one of the purest OO languages that ever existed.
1. Everything is an Object
• Integers? Objects.
• Classes? Objects.
• Control structures (like loops and conditionals)? Also objects.
2. Message Passing
• All computation in Smalltalk is performed by sending messages to objects, even arithmetic
3. Uniform Syntax
• The syntax is minimal and highly uniform. There’s no special syntax for control flow or built-in types — it’s all handled through message passing.
4. Reflection and Metaprogramming
• Smalltalk systems are highly introspective — you can inspect and modify the environment, classes, and even the compiler itself, all at runtime.
Internal Reflection — maybe thats why I dont like SQL, way too primitive??
Here is a (fun) OO example in Smalltalk
Class Person
Inherited Class
Transcript show: name, ‘ has $’, money printString; cr.
- Honest Merge has $120
- The Best Deal Ever has $1200
When using AI you must be really really careful if you dont understand these principles and using them actively in your code.
Here is a real Claude interaction
So in the end, we added ONE new internal method in the ProductService Class
One line of code!
Not understanding OO, and you would probably have gone for the first recommendation from Claude which would have increased the technical debt sustantially and added much more complexity.
This was a long post, but if you are this far, send a connect request comment with an answer to “Guess who Promotes the Best Deal Ever!” and I will connect :-)
