lies about OOP

[Paul McGuire]

"Jive" <someone at microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:Revvd.807843$SM5.50718 at news.easynews.com...
>
<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).

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."

-- Paul