If you’ve taken a programming course in high school or college, or keep up with the programming literature, you’ve already been introduced to the concept of object-oriented programming (OOP). OOP introduces the idea that programs should model the way the real world is shaped, which means programs are made up of objects that interact with other objects.
A Really Brief History of Object-Oriented Programming
The first object-oriented programming language was Simula, which was first developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Simula was developed as a superset of the ALGOL 60 language (one of the most influential, yet under-utilized programming languages), and it introduced the concepts of classes, inheritance, virtual procedures, and coroutines.
An Object-Oriented Word-Frequency Count Program
This brings us to our current task — designing a word-frequency count program that exhibits traditional, object-oriented features. The first task is to break the problem up into objects. There are three major objects making up this problem:
- the text we’re pulling words from;
- the stop words we want to remove from the text;
- the word frequencies themselves.
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