When I discovered (reinvented; see About page) object-oriented programming (in the mid-1980s) I was overjoyed. It solved many of my most irritating problems with programming. Frankly, I had become quite bored with (business) programming, it just seemed to be endless tedium, solving basically the same problems over and over with only slight variations.
OOP made programming interesting again. So I started reading. Everything I could get my hands on.
And I started talking to other programmers about this great “new” paradigm. I was excited, enthusiastic, and verbose. My excitement was not all that contagious, until I was able to show others how this new way of thinking solved their problems.
Each step in the evolution embeds more knowledge into the language, which in turn reduces the effort required to solve problems. As such, I have come to view object-oriented programming as one of the most significant steps in the evolutionary process. OOP unites state and behavior, and reorganizes an application around principles of communication. Uniting state and behavior is a fairly simple evolutionary step; the additional shift of thinking about patterns of communication instead of flow of control was a giant step. Nevertheless, I am of the opinion that OOP as a programming paradigm was inevitable.
About Steven A. Lowe