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

Chapter 43. Getting the Message

What does an object look like? Who uses it, and how do they use it? What makes it useful?

In one sense, users and the user interfaces they face have been the raison d'être of object technology. It was to solve problems in graphical presentation and in user interaction with what were then called cathode ray displays that Ivan Sutherland first devised many of the core concepts in object-oriented programming. Indeed, an academic colleague of mine once remarked that nearly everything in modern object technology can be found in Sutherland's 1963 thesis on Sketchpad (See Sutherland 1963).

Since those primeval days, the literature of object orientation has grown to elephantine proportions, yet what is said of users and user ...