ObjectOrientedHistory

A Brief History of Object Oriented Languages

Ctalk is designed similarly to many other object oriented languages. The object oriented language paradigm has a long history in the development of programming languages, and Ctalk has many predecessors.

The first object oriented languages were designed for simulation and modeling tasks, where objects could assume the characteristics of real-world objects. The language Simula, developed through the 1960's was the first language to implement classes, inheritance, virtual methods, and other features of object oriented languages.

This was followed about a decade later by Smalltalk, with the first widely used implementation, Smalltalk-80, developed as a programming environment for graphics workstations. Many other versions of Smalltalk followed, all of which provide an integrated development, with a well defined and extensable class library, development tools, and user applications. Smalltalk pioneered the mouse-window-menu style of computer interface design.

Most languages that followed adopted some of the features of these object oriented languages and their environments. Ctalk also adopts many of these features, and it takes advantage of modern hardware to provide client-server services, all of which provide greatly improved the extensiblity and scalability. Ctalk is also designed to be suited for systems programming, which means it is equally adept at implementing low-level routines, while still allowing applications to take advantage of object oriented features when necessary.

The first time information about Ctalk appeared in print was in the C/C++ Users Journal. You can read the article here.

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