On Fri, Jul 7, 2017 at 6:54 AM, Jonathan Wilson
<piercing_male@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I wonder if one of the reasons why OO is, or seems, less applicable to
the "400" is that like the OS, programs have always been "object based".
Honestly, I don't think this is one of the reasons. This is a real pet
peeve of mine. The "object-based" nature of the OS doesn't have any
bearing one way or another on object-oriented programming.
As for "object-based programs", what you have described is what the
rest of the computing world (and actually most of the midrange world
too) calls *modular* programming. This is not something unique to the
midrange platform. In fact, it's a style of programming that has been
around on every platform and supported by most programming languages
since perhaps the late '60s and definitely popular by the '70s. A lot
of the values that form the core principles of modular programming are
actually holdovers and extensions of the even earlier concept of
"structured programming". And we got structured programming pretty
much as soon as we realized that spaghetti was not the most desirable
approach.
To be fair to the truly ancient forebears who practiced what I'll call
"pre-structured programming" avidly and without shame, back then the
hardware constraints were severe to a degree that most of us cannot
imagine working with today. Some proto-programmers dealt with physical
wire. Here is a great story, I don't know how apocryphal, of those
pre-structured days:
<
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html>
John Y.
midrange.com
