Languages and object-oriented programming

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Abstract
In a recent article Alan Kay, the originator of Smalltalk, wrote: ‘The move to object-oriented design represents a real change in point of view — a change of paradigm — that brings with it an enormous increase in expressive power’ (Scientific American, September 1984). If this statement is true, it is clearly important to know what is meant by object-oriented design. Object-oriented programming is perhaps more common terminology; however. ‘object-oriented programming’, rather like ‘structured programming’, is not something that can be simply defined. It has become very fashionable to describe any and all software, hardware and user-interface systems as ‘object-oriented’, and this fashion tends to obscure the fact that ‘object-oriented programming’ does represent a fairly fundamental change in the way programming is carried out and understood. This paper issustrates the meaning of ‘object-oriented programming’ by describing its constituent notions, and showing how the programming languages Simula-67, Smalltalk-80, Clu and Ada are related to it.

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