Peopleware Papers: Notes on the Human Side of Software, The

Chapter 24. Software Objectives

A programmer who snoozed through the better part of the last decade or two might not know about object-oriented programming. The rest of us have had it up to our tushies in objects. I am actually somewhat sympathetic toward the van Winkles of the industry, because in 1986, when I stumbled back into the computer field, object technology was a star on a meteoric rise, while a decade earlier, when I had last absented myself, object-oriented programming was an obscure brown dwarf hidden away in the cosmos of nebulous computing techniques. Trend spotting is surprisingly easy when you peek once a decade or so.

Not that object-orientation is particularly new. Although some writers have credited the failure of structured ...