Summary
Portions of the content on this page were adapted from Nathan Bean’s CIS 400 course at K-State, with the author’s permission. That content is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
In this chapter, we’ve discussed the environment in which object-orientation emerged. Early computers were limited in their computational power, and languages and programming techniques had to work around these limitations. Similarly, these computers were very expensive, so their purchasers were very concerned about getting the largest possible return on their investment. In the words of Niklaus Wirth:
Tricks were necessary at this time, simply because machines were built with limitations imposed by a technology in its early development stage, and because even problems that would be termed "simple" nowadays could not be handled in a straightforward way. It was the programmers' very task to push computers to their limits by whatever means available.
As computers became more powerful and less expensive, the demand for programs (and therefore programmers) grew faster than universities could train new programmers. Unskilled programmers, unwieldy programming languages, and programming approaches developed to address the problems of older technology led to what became known as the “software crisis” where many projects failed or floundered.
This led to the development of new programming techniques, languages, and paradigms to make the process of programming easier and less error-prone. Among the many new programming paradigms was structured programming paradigm, which introduced control-flow structures into programming languages to help programmers reason about the order of program execution in a clear and consistent manner. Also developed during this time was the object-oriented paradigm, which we will be studying in this course.
Programming Today
Today, many software developers have adopted techniques designed to produce high quality code. These include the use of automated unit testing and test-driven development, as well as standardized use of code comments and linters to maintain good coding style and ample documentation for future developers. In the project for this module, we’ll explore what this looks like by building a simple “Hello World” program that uses all of these techniques.
Review Quiz
Check your understanding of the new content introduced in this chapter below - this quiz is not graded and you can retake it as many times as you want.
Quizdown quiz omitted from print view.