OOP, MacApp
Volume Number: 5
Issue Number: 9
Column Tag: MacOOPs!
Back to the Future: OOP & MacApp
By Jean-Denis Muys-Vasovic, Argenteuil, France
Back to the future: OOP & MacApp
(or: The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to Objectivity)
The s eventies saw the increasing popularity of a programming technology known
as “structured programming”, of which the best witness is the good & famous book by
Niklaus Wirth: Algorithm + Data Structures = Programs. The design of programming
languages followed this trend, beginning with Pascal, and ending with Ada or Modula II.
On the other hand, the eighties have seen the birth of another programming
concept, whose roots can be found in the s eventies as well: Object-Oriented
Programming. This technology has not yet got its “Algorithm + Data Structures =
Programs”, though a few good books are around. The roots of Object-Oriented
Programming are buried deep in the past, and go back to the early s eventies when a
research team at the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), including (sounds
familiar?) Alan Kay, Ted Kaehler, Larry Tesler, started to design Smalltalk And yet
Object-Oriented Programming (OOP in short) is the way of the future. The object of
this short article is to explain some of the hows and whys. Follow me if you dare to The
Restaurant At The End of Programming Knowledge.
Object-Oriented Programming
What is Object-Oriented Programming by the way? This question, often asked, is
much more seldom answered. The fact is that it is difficult to answer it without calling
on associated definitions:
Object-Oriented Programming is the compliance to the technology by which a