Re: Clean Object Class Design -- What is it?

Good Points, Lee. Especially in differentiating between some good ideas and a panacea.

Regarding "Forth", I've seen people write that the first Object Oriented language was Simula, first created in 1967. Can anyone confirm this? Do the Originators of Smalltalk make specific reference to Simula in their notes? Is 1967 the right year? How many of the OO ideas were, in fact, present in Simula?

I think the biggest thing that turns me off about OO propaganda is the "revolutionary" tone that pervades evangelical object orientating literature. I think of the progress that's been made in the last 50 years as very rapid evolution...not revolution. A lot of ideas that OO people have adopted as their own were present, in one form or another, in programming techniques that weren't specifically OO techniques. (A lot of indexed files were pretty well normalized, too, even if the file designer never heard of normalization).

The difference between "rapid evolution" and "revolution" is subtle but important, like the difference between "rapid combustion" and "explosion" in a Gasoline-air mixture.

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Regards,
    David Cressey
    www.dcressey.com