A Programming Allegory

Once, in the long, long ago, the prophet descended from the mountain. We called him Alan Kay, praise be upon his name. He told us the gospel of objects and the priests heard him, and the priests told the people, who had been suffering greatly.

However, as is often the case, the priests mistook the letter for the spirit. “Thou shalt have private variables! Thou shalt have getters! Thou shalt have setters! By this means you will protect the internal state invariance of the LORD! To do otherwise shall be an abomination!”

If the priests were prone to legalism, the people were prone to superstition. Getters and setters appeared everywhere. But, they did not protect state invariance. They didn’t do anything that a public instance variable didn’t do. Those heretics who proposed that the getters and setters should be used to protect state invariance were dismissed. Such a thing would make objects “complex,” and is not complexity an abomination unto our LORD?

Those among the people who were not superstition were rebellious and became objective atheists. Some returned to paganism, though curiously without ever reading any pagan literature. “If our own priests had failed us,” they thought, “the pagan priests will not have done better.”

Others, but not many, turned to the dark arts of λ, whose name we dare not speak.