When entering the domain of programming, one finds a plethora of programming languages to choose from; and there are more being introduced nearly every day. Each language was designed for a purpose. From Assembly language, designed simply as a way to write machine code easier, to C, designed to be as “close to the machine” as possible without actually becoming a low-level language, and Perl, designed for text processing.

The interesting thing? They don’t have to be used as designed. Perl, while created by Larry Wall to make text processing of reports easier, has been applied in all sorts of problem domains effectively. Visual Basic can be used to write STDCall DLLs. Scripting languages, once relegated to creating silly animations to annoy users visiting web pages, has found use both on the desktop as well as server side web processing.

As the Information Technology industry has aged so too have the techniques used for programming. new techniques are tried all the time. Previously, the widely held winning formula was called “Structured programming” because, rather then using Goto’s or conditional jumps, the language itself contained constructed for “structuring” code, a method that allows the code to be more readable and organized. It also embraced a top-down approach, whereby the “function” is created before the routine that requires it. Original “pioneers” for this strategem are numerous, but the recognized “original breeds” are  Pascal and C. Pascal was created as a teaching tool. by enforcing a number of things widely held asgood programming practice as part of the language, it “conditioned” new programmers to keep these habits when they moved to other languages. As Pascal evolved, however, it was made more useful, and more applicable to the creation of real applications. C, on the other hand, was designed to allow programmers easy access to a wide variety of functions, both of the language as well as the “bare metal”. This “bare metal” approach was facilitated with “naked” functions as well as inline assembly.

The “Structured Programming” concept dominated the academic circles, and was implemented as a standard by programming firms the world over. However- there was a pattern to how it was used, and this pattern, once recognized, was used to develop the “next leap”.

Program source code that was “structured” had it’s many components separated into various modules, and procedures. Each module would often hold the structure definitions and the procedures to handle them. For example, a program designed to graph functions might have a module, perhaps, modFunctions, depending on the naming convention. This module would define the “structure”- or in memory representation – of the various properties of a function- the expression, range, etc. The routines in the module would be used to manipulate draw, set, and retrieve the various items stored in the structure.

Eventually, this was migrated into the structure itself- that is, a structure might be defined to hold both the data relevant to the function as well as pointers to routines that manipulated it. The common convention was that the first parameter to these routines would be a pointer to the structure being acted on.

This type of programming was first implemented in C, and it worked great. essentially, it combined the concepts of Functions, and the data they manipulated, and created a single entity- the resulting structure. Oftentime the only routine required was a function that returned a pointer to the structure, after initializing the various function pointers. this because known as a constructor.

The problem with this technique was simply that there was a lot of work involved with using this technique- initializing pointers and other “bookkeeping” type tasks. the concept, however, was solid. Languages sprung up that implemented this technique internally, and exposed only those parts of the “object” as it became known, that needed to be coded or used. The concept spread like wildfire. Languages that once conformed to the “structured” paradigm were adapted and given object-based features. Pascal variants known as “Object Pascal” which more fully implemented the loosely object-like syntax of Pascal itself, were created. C was extended into C++, implementing nearly all of the Object Oriented concepts, such as inheritance and interfaces, and so forth. BASIC, in the form of Visual Basic, got Object Based, and later, with VB4, loosely object oriented. Entire languages sprung up on the concept that a “purely” object-oriented language would be the best choice. An early language of this form- or more precisely, the first more popular language of this form, was Java.

With Java, everything was an object. a simple console application was comprised of at least one object. at this point, the code that created the objects, – the very “template” from which they were instantiated, were known as “classes”. it was not until a “class” was instantiated that it became an object.

While Java, with it’s pure Object Oriented approach, created clean code as opposed to a structured language, or half-object based language, it also had shortfalls. While Object Oriented Programming was a excellent concept- it couldn’t always be used to apply to everything, and oftentimes a short quick little program was all that was needed. Java was however well suited to internet applications, since it was also a byte-code based interpreted language.

Now that the Object Oriented approach has matured and entire frameworks have been created based on the concept, such as .NET, one cannot help but wonder wether the idea is to make it easier for the programmer or the user. Just because a language makes it easier to program, or a certain conceptual method of creating said program makes it trivial to do something, doesn’t mean that the user’s experience with the application is any better. What if a user requests a feature not implemented by the run-time? Sure, there are “native” method calls in almost all such language, but is this not, in some sense, an admittance of defeat? that the Object Oriented approach is not flawless? Or, perhaps it is less controversial- maybe it is simply a lesser admittance of failure on the part of the Object Oriented design set forth by the creator of the framework.  But the fact remains- the framework does not make implementing the feature easier. Is this not what the framework is for, however?

So the ultimate question is- are we any better, now, with class framework and libraries all around us, then we were when we had basic Input/output and generic function libraries, and were left to fend for ourselves with all sorts of mundane programming tasks that we now take for granted?

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