Historical Perspective

OOP provides a means to tackle various aspects of complexity that arise during the creation and maintenance of applications. It does so through various means, such as encapsulation of state and polymorphism, stimulating reuse of existing functionality through class hierarchies.

If we go one level up from OOP, we find ourselves back in the world of procedural programming, where a different sort of complexity is dealt with. By stimulating the use of procedures (methods) to reuse blocks of code, parameterized by some inputs, excessive duplication of code is avoided.

We can continue our way up the chain, landing at structured programming, where the use of low-level goto statements is strongly discouraged, in favor of control ...

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