One of the great advancements in the art of programming occurred when the concepts embodied by object oriented programming made its debut. The consensus is that the object programming style garnered legitimacy by appearing in Byte Magazine. The language was called Smalltalk. The year was 1981.
Object oriented programming, or OO as it is referred to by legions of beloved brethren to this day represented a seismic shift in the programming universe as it appeared in 1981. That was 38 years ago. Prince Charles and Lady Diana were on their honeymoon, and Micheal Jackson’s Thriller was only a concept.
Slow to catch on, mis-understand by the programming masses, and the believers (those who understood the implication) were simply shunned by the traditionalists at that time. OO was different because it enabled the programmer to introduce objects into the code, and objects are meant to represent something. That something could be real world things, houses, cars, trees, rocks, bank accounts, milkshakes and so on. Objects are connected to other objects, objects influence other objects. Objects pass messages back and forth, and some objects bend other objects to do their bidding. Suddenly the programmer was now lord and creator of a model of life; it gave her purpose and motivation. Programming was no longer a series of instructions to the cold, hard machine to move this bit over to that register, add the contents, and carry on with arcane machine instructions. OO was revolutionary in 1981. But the industry was sleeping, mesmerized by the sheer potentiality of what it was to become.