Paradigm shift
A short story from the perspective of a C++ developer
In the beginning…
The year was 1972. Dennis Ritchie, an American computer scientist, created C programming language, the most prominent imperative programming language of today. It was designed to provide constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions. With portability in mind, it was a relief that you can write portable code which can be successfully compiled and run on various computer platforms.
The old world wasn’t sleeping. Almost decade before the first appearance of C, Simula (“Simulation language”) was created at Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Simula is considered the first object-oriented (OO) programming language.
It will turn out that C and Simula had major influence on today’s most popular programming languages.