"Jive" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<snip>
But by '86, the Joy of OOP was widely known.
"Widely known"? Errr? In 1986, "object-oriented" programming was barely marketing-speak. Computing hardware in the mid-80's just wasn't up to the task of dealing with OO memory and "messaging" overhead. Apple Macs were still coding in C and Forth. Borland didn't ship Turbo-Pascal with Object-Oriented programming until 1989, and Turbo-C++ shipped in 1991. Smalltalk had been around for 10 years by 1986, but it was still a curiosity, hardly "widely known." It wasn't until the publication of David Taylor's "Object Technology: A Manager's Guide" in 1990 that OOP began to be legitimized to many management decision makers, that it was more than just "fairy dust" (as Bill Gates had characterized it in an attempt to discredit Borland's forays into the field).
In my view THAT byte article on Smalltalk in the early '80 was the beginning.
Then came Brad Cox's book.
Then there was Glockenspiel's C++ for PC in about '87 or '88. And, of course, cfont on unix from about, what, '85?
Across the late '80s there was, of course, Eiffel which seemed a remarkable piece of work for the time. And was backed by a terrific book by Myer.
Then it all seemed to take off once C++ version 2.0 was minted.
I would pick the publication of "Design Patterns" in 1995 by the Gang of Four (Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides), to be the herald of when "the Joy of OOP" would be "widely known." DP formalized a taxonomy for many of the heuristics that had evolved only intuitively up until then. Its emergence reflects a general maturation of concept and practice, sufficient to say that the Joy of OOP could be said to be "widely known."
In actual fact, virtually all the design patterns came from the Interviews C++ GUI toolkit written in the early '90s. What an utterly brilliant piece of work that was.
-- Mike
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