How Object-Oriented Programming Was Born and Shaped Modern Software
Object-oriented programming (OOP) emerged in the 1960s to solve the chaos of large programs where any function could alter any shared data, making bugs difficult to trace and code hard to reuse. Norwegian researchers Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard developed Simula 67 between 1962 and 1967, introducing foundational concepts like classes, objects, inheritance, and virtual methods. Alan Kay later coined the term 'object-oriented' and led the creation of Smalltalk at Xerox PARC, advancing the idea that everything should be an object communicating via messages. Bjarne Stroustrup brought these ideas to mainstream industry with C++ in 1983, while Java in 1995 made class-based OOP the standard for enterprise software. Both Dahl, Nygaard, and Kay were eventually recognised with Turing Awards, cementing OOP as a foundational concept in computer science.
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