What Does the Future Hold?

So what will be the next step? Well, as the saying goes, prediction is hard, particularly about the future. One can only guess, and I'm not certain that my guess is any more intelligent than anybody elses guess.

However, once you have accepted the idea of an application formed as a community of interacting agents, there is no reason by those components must exsit on the same computer, or even be written in the same languages. Loosening these ties leads us to distributed computing, or to component based computing, both active areas of research and development right now. So we see that some of the trends we observe today in software are natrual results of the OOP mind set.

[audio] [real] Text to accompany slide30, in Chapter 2 of An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming