Paul McGuire wrote:
Well, that's not true either, and the fact that Bill Gates was denigrating it implies that he at least knew about it, even if he chose not to adopt it (then: of course nowadays Microsoft call almost all their technologies "object oriented"; sometimes this description is as accurate as when Gates speaks about "our open Windows environment")."Jive" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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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).
We could all make our own choices, but anyone who's been programming *seriously* since the 60s will likely remember Simula as the birth of many oft he ideas later picked up by Alan Kay and promoted by the Xerox PARC SmallTalk group.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."
I visited that group in 1981 (after Kay left, unfortunately, and then being headed by Adele Goldberg, who is now coincidentally promoting the delights of Python at conferences like OSCON), and object-oriented programming was certainly something that was being taken pretty seriously in the academic world as a potential solution to some serious PLIT engineering problems.
The fact that it took the technology a relatively long time to appear "in the wild", so to speak, is simply the natural maturation of any new technology. Given that UNIX was developed in the early 1970s I'd say it took UNIX 20 years to start becoming mainstream. But a lot of people knew about it before it *became* mainstream, especially those who had to place their technology bets early. The same is true of object-oriented concepts.
I guess this is just to say that I'd dispute your contention that SmallTalk was a curiosity - unless you define anything of interest mostly to the academic world as a curiosity, in which case there's no way to overcome your objection. It was the first major implementation of an entire system based exclusively on OO programming concepts and, while far from ideal, was a seminal precursor to today's object-oriented systems.
regards Steve
-- Steve Holden http://www.holdenweb.com/ Python Web Programming http://pydish.holdenweb.com/ Holden Web LLC +1 703 861 4237 +1 800 494 3119 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
