Programming in the 1960s had a big problem: computers weren’t that powerful yet, and somehow they needed to split the capacities between data structures and procedures.

This meant that if you had a large set of data, you couldn’t do that much with it without pushing a computer to its limits. On the other hand, if you needed to do a lot of things, you couldn’t use too much data or the computer would take forever.

Then Alan Kay came around in 1966 or 1967 and theorized that one could use encapsulated mini-computers that didn’t share their data, but rather communicated through messaging. This way, compute resources could be used much more economically.

Despite the ingenuity of the idea, it would take until 1981 until object-oriented programming hit the mainstream. Since then, however, it hasn’t stopped attracting new and seasoned software developers alike. The market for object-oriented programmers is as busy as ever.

But in recent years, the decade-old paradigm has received more and more criticism. Could it be that, four decades after object-oriented programming hit the masses, technology is outgrowing this paradigm?

#software-development #functional-programming #object-oriented #data-science