The History of Object Oriented Programming
The basis for OOP started in the early 1960s. A breakthrough involving instances and objects was achieved at MIT with the PDP-1, and the first programming language to use objects was Simula 67. It was designed for the purpose of creating simulations, and was developed by Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl in Norway.
They were working on simulations that deal with exploding ships, and realized they could group the ships into different categories. Each ship type would have its own class, and the class would generate its unique behavior and data. Simula was not only responsible for introducing the concept of a class, but it also introduced the instance of a class.
The term "object oriented programming " was first used by Xerox PARC in their Smalltalk programming language. The term was used to refer to the process of using objects as the foundation for computation. The Smalltalk team was inspired by the Simula 67 project, but they designed Smalltalk so that it would be dynamic. The objects could be changed, created, or deleted, and this was different from the static systems that were commonly used. Smalltalk was also the first programming language to introduce the inheritance concept. It is this feature that allowed Smalltalk to surpass both Simula 67 and the analog programming systems. While these systems were advanced for their time, they did not use the inheritance concept.
Simula 67 was a groundbreaking system that has inspired a large number of other programming languages, and some of these include Pascal and Lisp. By the 1980s, object oriented programming had become prominent, and the primary factor in this is C++. Object oriented programming was also important for the development of Graphical user interfaces. The Cocoa structure that exists within Mac OS X is a good example of a dynamic GUI that works with an object oriented programming language. This paradigm of programming has also played an important role in the development of event-driven programming.
Niklaus Wirth and his associates were looking at areas such as modular programming and data abstraction, and they developed two systems which incorporated these elements. These two systems are Oberon and Modula-2. Oberon used a unique approach to classes and object orientation that is much different than C++ or Smalltalk. Since the introduction of OOP, a large number of modern programming languages are now using the concept. Some of these are Fortran, BASIC, and Pascal. There have been some compatibility issues, because many programs were not designed with a OOPs approach in mind. Object oriented programming languages that were "pure" did not have many of the functions that programmers needed.
To solve these problems, a number of researchers have been attempting to design new programming languages that used object oriented concepts but still retained many of the functions that programmers needed. One example of a programming language that has achieved this to some degree is Eiffel. Another programming language that has attempted to solve this problem is Java. Java has become popular because it uses a virtual machine, and it is very similar to C++ and C. The virtual machine is important because it allows code to be run on multiple platforms without having to be changed. Another system that is similar is Microsoft’s .NET. Many developers now understand the importance of OOP, and are actively using it within their own programs. Many researchers have continued to make advancements by using the object oriented approach.
There are a number of other languages that have successfully combined the object oriented approach with procedures that are useful to programmers. Python is one example, and Ruby uses a similar approach as well.
The use of an object oriented approach has led to advancements in modeling languages, design patterns, and a number of other areas. It is likely that OOP is a programming paradigm that will continue to evolve as we move forward into the future. It is a powerful language which has continued to improve over the years. It is the subject of debate within the programming community, as critics point out a number of problems with the structure. However, the popularity of programming languages such as Java demonstrate that it is a paradigm that is here to stay.
