Object-Oriented Programming: Themes and Variations

The first substantial interactive, display-based implementation was the SMALLTALK language (Goldberg & Robson, 1983). The object-oriented style has often been advocated for simulation programs, systems programming, graphics, and AI programming. The history of ideas has some additional threads including work on message passing as in ACTORS (Lieberman, 1981), and multiple inheritance as in FLAVORS (Weinreb & Moon, 1981). It is also related to a line of work in AI on the theory of frames (Minsky, 1975) and their implementation in knowledge representation languages such as KRL (Bobrow & Winograd, 1977), KEE (Fikes & Kehler, 1985), FRL (Goldstein & Roberts, 1977) and UNITS (Stefik, 1979). One might expect from this long history that by now there would be agreement on the fundamental principles of object-oriented programming.