Why has OOP Remained Popular for so long?
While it was once considered revolutionary,
object-oriented programming has now been the dominant programming paradigm
for more than twenty years.
That's an incredibly long period of time in the history of computer
science (which can perhaps only be traced back to the 1940's or thereabouts).
Why has this idea been so popular for so long?
Here are a few possible reasons.
- It has a proven record of success. It has been incredibly useful in
a wide number of systems, projects that would have been difficult if not
impossible without the use of OO techniques.
- OOP scales well. It can be introduced in small applications, and yet
the same techniques can be applied to projects of tens of thousands of lines
of code.
- The OOP idea is easy to explain. It has a resonant similarity to
the way that people think about problems in other domains. That means
that intuition and skills that people have developed in other
problem domains can be brought to bear on problems addressed in the OOP
fashion.
Nevertheless, OOP is not a panacea, a silver bullet. Programming computers
is still a difficult task, one that requires patience, intelligence, skill
and talent. No tool has yet been found that will change this fundamental
truth.