Programming - Learning C# by Programming Games - page 14

methods belonged together as well. The object-oriented paradigm allows to group
methods into something called a class . The memory that these groups of methods
could change is called an object . The first object-oriented language ever conceived
was Simula . It was created in 1967 by the Norwegian researchers Ole-Johan Dahl
and Kristen Nygaard. They developed their own programming language Simula as
an extension of Algol, because they were interested in doing simulations to analyze
traffic flux or the behavior of queues of people in the post office. One of the new
things in Simula was that it identified a group of variables in the memory as an ob-
ject . This was very useful, because it allowed to describe a person in the post office
or a car as an object.
Simula itself was not a very popular language, but the idea to describe a program
in terms of objects and classes was picked up by researchers at Xerox in Palo Alto,
who—even before Apple and Microsoft—were experimenting with windows-based
systems and an actual mouse. Their language called Smalltalk used objects to model
windows, buttons, scrollbars, and so on: all more or less independent objects. But
Smalltalk was carrying things to extremes: absolutely everything was supposed to
be an object, and as a result the language was not very easy to use. However, it
was clear that objects were useful, and that there should be a C-like language that
allowed for using objects. That language became C++, where the two plus signs
indicated that it was a successor of C. The first version of C++ dates from 1978
and the official standard appeared in 1981. The C++ language was very useful for
writing windows-based programs, which was becoming more and more popular in
the 1980s. But the success of C++ is also due to the fact that it is a true extension
of C: the old C programs still worked in C++.
Although the language C++ is standard, C++ did not contain a standard way
to write windows-based programs on different types of operating systems. Writing
such a program on an Apple-computer, a Windows-computer, or a Unix-computer
is a completely different task, which makes running C++ programs on different
operating systems a complicated issue. Initially, this was not really considered a
problem, but when the Internet became more popular, the ability to run the same
program on different operating systems would be very convenient.
2.3.4 Java
The time was ripe for a new programming language: one that would be standardized
for usage on different operating systems. The language should be similar to C++,
but it would also be a nice opportunity to remove some of that old C stuff from
the language to simplify things. The language Java fulfilled this role (no abbrevi-
ation or mathematician this time, simply the name of the favorite coffee brand of
the designers). Java was launched in 1995 by the hardware manufacturer Sun that
used a revolutionary business model for that time: the software was free, and they
planned to make money on the support. Also not unimportant for Sun was to com-
pete with the growing popularity of Microsoft software, which did not run on the
Unix computers produced by Sun.