● Devlin, Keith (2004).

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"Object-oriented" redirects here. For other meanings of object-oriented, see

Object-orientation.
 UML notation for a class. This Button class has variables for data, and
functions. Through inheritance, a subclass can be created as a subset of the Button class. Objects
are instances of a class.

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the

concept of objects,[1] which can contain data and code: data in the form of fields
(often known as attributes or properties), and code in the form of procedures
(often known as methods). In OOP, computer programs are designed by making
them out of objects that interact with one another. [2][3]

Many of the most widely used programming languages (such as C++, Java,[4]
Python, etc.) are multi-paradigm and they support object-oriented programming
to a greater or lesser degree, typically in combination with imperative
programming, procedural programming and functional programming.

Significant object-oriented languages include Ada, ActionScript, C++, Common

Lisp, C#, Dart, Eiffel, Fortran 2003, Haxe, Java,[4] Kotlin, Logo, MATLAB,
Objective-C, Object Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Raku, Ruby, Scala, SIMSCRIPT,
Simula, Smalltalk, Swift, Vala and Visual Basic.NET.

History[edit]

Terminology invoking "objects" in the modern sense of object-oriented

programming made its first appearance at the artificial intelligence group at MIT
in the late 1950s and early 1960s. "Object" referred to LISP atoms with identified
properties (attributes).[5][6] Another early MIT example was Sketchpad created by
Ivan Sutherland in 1960–1961; in the glossary of the 1963 technical report based
on his dissertation about Sketchpad, Sutherland defined notions of "object" and
"instance" (with the class concept covered by "master" or "definition"), albeit
specialized to graphical interaction.[7] Also, in 1968, an MIT ALGOL version, AED-
0, established a direct link between data structures ("plexes", in that dialect) and
procedures, prefiguring what were later termed "messages", "methods", and
"member functions".[8][9] Topics such as data abstraction and modular
programming were common points of discussion at this time.

Independently of later MIT work such as AED, Simula was developed during the
years 1961–1967.[8] Simula introduced important concepts that are today an
essential part of object-oriented programming, such as class and object,
inheritance, and dynamic binding.[10] The object-oriented Simula programming
language was used mainly by researchers involved with physical modelling, such
as models to study and improve the movement of ships and their content through
cargo ports.[10]

I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual computers on a network, only able to
communicate with messages (so messaging came at the very beginning – it took a while to see how to
do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be useful).

[1]
Alan Kay,

Influenced by the work at MIT and the Simula language, in November 1966 Alan
Kay began working on ideas that would eventually be incorporated into the
Smalltalk programming language. Kay used the term "object-oriented
programming" in conversation as early as 1967.[1] Although sometimes called
"the father of object-oriented programming",[11] Alan Kay has differentiated his
notion of OO from the more conventional abstract data type notion of object, and
has implied that the computer science establishment did not adopt his notion. [1]
A 1976 MIT memo co-authored by Barbara Liskov lists Simula 67, CLU, and
Alphard as object-oriented languages, but does not mention Smalltalk. [12]

In the 1970s, the first version of the Smalltalk programming language was
developed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls and Adele Goldberg.
Smalltalk-72 included a programming environment and was dynamically typed,
and at first was interpreted, not compiled. Smalltalk became noted for its
application of object orientation at the language-level and its graphical
development environment. Smalltalk went through various versions and interest
in the language grew.[13] While Smalltalk was influenced by the ideas introduced
in Simula 67 it was designed to be a fully dynamic system in which classes could
be created and modified dynamically.[14]

During the late 1970s and 1980s, object-oriented programming rose to

prominence. The Flavors object-oriented Lisp was developed starting 1979,
introducing multiple inheritance and mixins.[15] In 1981, Goldberg edited the
August issue of Byte Magazine, introducing Smalltalk and object-oriented
programming to a wide audience.[16] LOOPS, the object system for Interlisp-D,
was influenced by Smalltalk and Flavors, and a paper about it was published in
1982.[17] In 1986, the Association for Computing Machinery organized the first
Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and
Applications (OOPSLA), which was attended by 1,000 people. Among other
developments was the Common Lisp Object System, which integrates functional
programming and object-oriented programming and allows extension via a Meta-
object protocol. In the 1980s, there were a few attempts to design processor
architectures that included hardware support for objects in memory but these
were not successful. Examples include the Intel iAPX 432 and the Linn Smart
Rekursiv.

In the mid-1980s Objective-C was developed by Brad Cox, who had used
Smalltalk at ITT Inc.. Bjarne Stroustrup, who had used Simula for his PhD thesis,
created the object-oriented C++.[13] In 1985, Bertrand Meyer also produced the
first design of the Eiffel language. Focused on software quality, Eiffel is a purely
object-oriented programming language and a notation supporting the entire
software lifecycle. Meyer described the Eiffel software development method,
based on a small number of key ideas from software engineering and computer
science, in Object-Oriented Software Construction. Essential to the quality focus
of Eiffel is Meyer's reliability mechanism, Design by Contract, which is an integral
part of both the method and language.

In the early and mid-1990s object-oriented programming developed as the

dominant programming paradigm when programming languages supporting the
techniques became widely available. These included Visual FoxPro 3.0,[18][19][20]
C++,[21] and Delphi[citation needed]. Its dominance was further enhanced by the rising
popularity of graphical user interfaces, which rely heavily upon object-oriented
programming techniques. An example of a closely related dynamic GUI library
and OOP language can be found in the Cocoa frameworks on Mac OS X, written
in Objective-C, an object-oriented, dynamic messaging extension to C based on
Smalltalk. OOP toolkits also enhanced the popularity of event-driven
programming (although this concept is not limited to OOP).

At ETH Zürich, Niklaus Wirth and his colleagues investigated the concept of type
checking across module boundaries. Modula-2 (1978) included this concept, and
their succeeding design, Oberon (1987), included a distinctive approach to object
orientation, classes, and such. Inheritance is not obvious in Wirth's design since
his nomenclature looks in the opposite direction: It is called type extension and
the viewpoint is from the parent down to the inheritor.

Object-oriented features have been added to many previously existing

languages, including Ada, BASIC, Fortran, Pascal, and COBOL. Adding these
features to languages that were not initially designed for them often led to
problems with compatibility and maintainability of code.

More recently, some languages have emerged that are primarily object-oriented,
but that are also compatible with procedural methodology. Two such languages
are Python and Ruby. Probably the most commercially important recent object-
oriented languages are Java, developed by Sun Microsystems, as well as C# and
Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET), both designed for Microsoft's .NET platform. Each of
these two frameworks shows, in its way, the benefit of using OOP by creating an
abstraction from implementation. VB.NET and C# support cross-language
inheritance, allowing classes defined in one language to subclass classes
defined in the other language.

Features[edit]

See also: Comparison of programming languages (object-oriented

programming) and List of object-oriented programming terms

Object-oriented programming uses objects, but not all of the associated

techniques and structures are supported directly in languages that claim to
support OOP. The features listed below are common among languages
considered to be strongly class- and object-oriented (or multi-paradigm with OOP
support), with notable exceptions mentioned.[22][23][24][25] Christopher J. Date
stated that critical comparison of OOP to other technologies, relational in
particular, is difficult because of lack of an agreed-upon and rigorous definition
of OOP.[26]

Shared with non-OOP languages[edit]

● Variables that can store information formatted in a small number of

built-in data types like integers and alphanumeric characters. This may
include data structures like strings, lists, and hash tables that are either
built-in or result from combining variables using memory pointers.
● Procedures – also known as functions, methods, routines, or
subroutines – that take input, generate output, and manipulate data.
Modern languages include structured programming constructs like
loops and conditionals.

Modular programming support provides the ability to group procedures into files
and modules for organizational purposes. Modules are namespaced so identifiers
in one module will not conflict with a procedure or variable sharing the same
name in another file or module.

Objects[edit]

Main article: Object (computer science)

An object is a data structure or abstract data type containing fields (state

variables containing data) and methods (subroutines or procedures defining the
object's behavior in code). Fields may also be known as members, attributes, or
properties. Objects are typically stored as contiguous regions of memory.
Objects are accessed somewhat like variables with complex internal structures,
and in many languages are effectively pointers, serving as actual references to a
single instance of said object in memory within a heap or stack.

Objects sometimes correspond to things found in the real world. [27] For example,
a graphics program may have objects such as "circle", "square", and "menu". An
online shopping system might have objects such as "shopping cart",
"customer", and "product". Sometimes objects represent more abstract entities,
like an object that represents an open file, or an object that provides the service
of translating measurements from U.S. customary to metric.

Objects can contain other objects in their instance variables; this is known as
object composition. For example, an object in the Employee class might contain
(either directly or through a pointer) an object in the Address class, in addition to
its own instance variables like "first_name" and "position". Object composition is
used to represent "has-a" relationships: every employee has an address, so
every Employee object has access to a place to store an Address object (either
directly embedded within itself or at a separate location addressed via a pointer).
Date and Darwen have proposed a theoretical foundation that uses OOP as a kind
of customizable type system to support RDBMS, but it forbids object pointers.[28]

The OOP paradigm has been criticized for overemphasizing the use of objects for
software design and modeling at the expense of other important aspects
(computation/algorithms).[29][30] For example, Rob Pike has said that OOP
languages frequently shift the focus from data structures and algorithms to
types.[31] Steve Yegge noted that, as opposed to functional programming:[32]

Object Oriented Programming puts the nouns first and foremost. Why would you
go to such lengths to put one part of speech on a pedestal? Why should one kind
of concept take precedence over another? It's not as if OOP has suddenly made
verbs less important in the way we actually think. It's a strangely skewed
perspective.

Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure, described object systems as overly simplistic

models of the real world. He emphasized the inability of OOP to model time
properly, which is getting increasingly problematic as software systems become
more concurrent.[30]

Alexander Stepanov compares object orientation unfavourably to generic

programming:[29]

I find OOP technically unsound. It attempts to decompose the world in terms of

interfaces that vary on a single type. To deal with the real problems you need
multisorted algebras — families of interfaces that span multiple types. I find OOP
philosophically unsound. It claims that everything is an object. Even if it is true it
is not very interesting — saying that everything is an object is saying nothing at
all.

Inheritance[edit]

OOP languages are diverse, but typically OOP languages allow inheritance for
code reuse and extensibility in the form of either classes or prototypes. These
forms of inheritance are significantly different, but analogous terminology is used
to define the concepts of object and instance.

Class-based[edit]

In class-based programming, the most popular style, each object is required to

be an instance of a particular class. The class defines the data format or type
(including member variables and their types) and available procedures (class
methods or member functions) for a given type or class of object. Objects are
created by calling a special type of method in the class known as a constructor.
Classes may inherit from other classes, so they are arranged in a hierarchy that
represents "is-a-type-of" relationships. For example, class Employee might
inherit from class Person. All the data and methods available to the parent class
also appear in the child class with the same names. For example, class Person
might define variables "first_name" and "last_name" with method
"make_full_name()". These will also be available in class Employee, which might
add the variables "position" and "salary". It is guaranteed that all instances of
class Employee will have the same variables, such as the name, position, and
salary. Procedures and variables can be specific to either the class or the
instance; this leads to the following terms:
 ● Class variables – belong to the class as a whole; there is only one copy
of each variable, shared across all instances of the class
● Instance variables or attributes – data that belongs to individual
objects; every object has its own copy of each one. All 4 variables
mentioned above (first_name, position etc) are instance variables.
● Member variables – refers to both the class and instance variables that
are defined by a particular class.
● Class methods – belong to the class as a whole and have access to
only class variables and inputs from the procedure call
● Instance methods – belong to individual objects, and have access to
instance variables for the specific object they are called on, inputs, and
class variables

Depending on the definition of the language, subclasses may or may not be able
to override the methods defined by superclasses. Multiple inheritance is allowed
in some languages, though this can make resolving overrides complicated. Some
languages have special support for other concepts like traits and mixins, though,
in any language with multiple inheritance, a mixin is simply a class that does not
represent an is-a-type-of relationship. Mixins are typically used to add the same
methods to multiple classes. For example, class UnicodeConversionMixin might
provide a method unicode_to_ascii() when included in class FileReader and class
WebPageScraper, which do not share a common parent.

Abstract classes cannot be instantiated into objects; they exist only for
inheritance into other "concrete" classes that can be instantiated. In Java, the
final keyword can be used to prevent a class from being subclassed. [33]

Prototype-based[edit]

In contrast, in prototype-based programming, objects are the primary entities.

Generally, the concept of a "class" does not even exist. Rather, the prototype or
parent of an object is just another object to which the object is linked. In Self, an
object may have multiple or no parents,[34] but in the most popular prototype-
based language, Javascript, every object has one prototype link (and only one).
New objects can be created based on already existing objects chosen as their
prototype. You may call two different objects apple and orange a fruit if the object
fruit exists, and both apple and orange have fruit as their prototype. The idea of
the fruit class does not exist explicitly, but can be modeled as the equivalence
class of the objects sharing the same prototype, or as the set of objects
satisfying a certain interface (duck typing). Unlike class-based programming, it is
typically possible in prototype-based languages to define attributes and methods
not shared with other objects; for example, the attribute sugar_content may be
defined in apple but not orange.

Absence[edit]
Some languages like Go do not support inheritance at all. Go states that it is
object-oriented,[35] and Bjarne Stroustrup, author of C++, has stated that it is
possible to do OOP without inheritance.[36] The doctrine of composition over
inheritance advocates implementing has-a relationships using composition
instead of inheritance. For example, instead of inheriting from class Person,
class Employee could give each Employee object an internal Person object,
which it then has the opportunity to hide from external code even if class Person
has many public attributes or methods. Delegation is another language feature
that can be used as an alternative to inheritance.

Rob Pike has criticized the OO mindset for preferring a multilevel type hierarchy
with layered abstractions to a three-line lookup table.[37] He has called object-
oriented programming "the Roman numerals of computing".[38]

Bob Martin states that because they are software, related classes do not
necessarily share the relationships of the things they represent. [39]

Dynamic dispatch/message passing[edit]

It is the responsibility of the object, not any external code, to select the
procedural code to execute in response to a method call, typically by looking up
the method at run time in a table associated with the object. This feature is known
as dynamic dispatch. If the call variability relies on more than the single type of
the object on which it is called (i.e. at least one other parameter object is involved
in the method choice), one speaks of multiple dispatch. A method call is also
known as message passing. It is conceptualized as a message (the name of the
method and its input parameters) being passed to the object for dispatch.

Dispatch interacts with inheritance; if a method is not present in a given object or

class, the dispatch is delegated to its parent object or class, and so on, going up
the chain of inheritance.

Data abstraction and encapsulation[edit]

Data abstraction is a design pattern in which data are visible only to semantically
related functions, to prevent misuse. The success of data abstraction leads to
frequent incorporation of data hiding as a design principle in object-oriented and
pure functional programming. Similarly, encapsulation prevents external code
from being concerned with the internal workings of an object. This facilitates
code refactoring, for example allowing the author of the class to change how
objects of that class represent their data internally without changing any external
code (as long as "public" method calls work the same way). It also encourages
programmers to put all the code that is concerned with a certain set of data in the
same class, which organizes it for easy comprehension by other programmers.
Encapsulation is a technique that encourages decoupling.

In object oriented programming, objects provide a layer which can be used to

separate internal from external code and implement abstraction and
encapsulation. External code can only use an object by calling a specific
instance method with a certain set of input parameters, reading an instance
variable, or writing to an instance variable. A program may create many instances
of objects as it runs, which operate independently. This technique, it is claimed,
allows easy re-use of the same procedures and data definitions for different sets
of data, in addition to potentially mirroring real-world relationships intuitively.
Rather than utilizing database tables and programming subroutines, the
developer utilizes objects the user may be more familiar with: objects from their
application domain.[40] These claims that the OOP paradigm enhances reusability
and modularity have been criticized.[41][42]

If a class does not allow calling code to access internal object data and permits
access through methods only, this is also a form of information hiding. Some
languages (Java, for example) let classes enforce access restrictions explicitly,
for example, denoting internal data with the private keyword and designating
methods intended for use by code outside the class with the public keyword.[43]
Methods may also be designed public, private, or intermediate levels such as
protected (which allows access from the same class and its subclasses, but not
objects of a different class).[43] In other languages (like Python) this is enforced
only by convention (for example, private methods may have names that start
with an underscore). In C#, Swift & Kotlin languages, internal keyword permits
access only to files present in the same assembly, package, or module as that of
the class.[44]

In programming languages, particularly object-oriented ones, the emphasis on

abstraction is vital. Object-oriented languages extend the notion of type to
incorporate data abstraction, highlighting the significance of restricting access to
internal data through methods.[45] Eric S. Raymond has written that object-
oriented programming languages tend to encourage thickly layered programs
that destroy transparency.[46] Raymond compares this unfavourably to the
approach taken with Unix and the C programming language.[46]

The "open/closed principle" advocates that classes and functions "should be

open for extension, but closed for modification". Luca Cardelli has claimed that
OOP languages have "extremely poor modularity properties with respect to class
extension and modification", and tend to be extremely complex. [41] The latter
point is reiterated by Joe Armstrong, the principal inventor of Erlang, who is
quoted as saying:[42]

The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit
environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what
you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.

Leo Brodie has suggested a connection between the standalone nature of

objects and a tendency to duplicate code[47] in violation of the don't repeat
yourself principle[48] of software development.

Polymorphism[edit]

Subtyping – a form of polymorphism – is when calling code can be independent

of which class in the supported hierarchy it is operating on – the parent class or
one of its descendants. Meanwhile, the same operation name among objects in
an inheritance hierarchy may behave differently.

For example, objects of the type Circle and Square are derived from a common
class called Shape. The Draw function for each type of Shape implements what is
necessary to draw itself while calling code can remain indifferent to the particular
type of Shape being drawn.

This is another type of abstraction that simplifies code external to the class
hierarchy and enables strong separation of concerns.

Open recursion[edit]

A common feature of objects is that methods are attached to them and can
access and modify the object's data fields. In this brand of OOP, there is usually
a special name such as this or self used to refer to the current object. In
languages that support open recursion, object methods can call other methods
on the same object (including themselves) using this name. This variable is late-
bound; it allows a method defined in one class to invoke another method that is
defined later, in some subclass thereof.

OOP languages[edit]
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See also: List of object-oriented programming languages

Simula (1967) is generally accepted as being the first language with the primary
features of an object-oriented language. It was created for making simulation
programs, in which what came to be called objects were the most important
information representation. Smalltalk (1972 to 1980) is another early example and
the one with which much of the theory of OOP was developed. Concerning the
degree of object orientation, the following distinctions can be made:

● Languages called "pure" OO languages, because everything in them is

treated consistently as an object, from primitives such as characters
and punctuation, all the way up to whole classes, prototypes, blocks,
modules, etc. They were designed specifically to facilitate, even
enforce, OO methods. Examples: Ruby, Scala, Smalltalk, Eiffel,
Emerald,[49] JADE, Self, Raku.
● Languages designed mainly for OO programming, but with some
procedural elements. Examples: Java, Python, C++, C#, Delphi/Object
Pascal, VB.NET.
● Languages that are historically procedural languages, but have been
extended with some OO features. Examples: PHP, JavaScript, Perl,
Visual Basic (derived from BASIC), MATLAB, COBOL 2002, Fortran
2003, ABAP, Ada 95, Pascal.
● Languages with most of the features of objects (classes, methods,
inheritance), but in a distinctly original form. Examples: Oberon
(Oberon-1 or Oberon-2).
● Languages with abstract data type support which may be used to
resemble OO programming, but without all features of object-
orientation. This includes object-based and prototype-based languages.
Examples: JavaScript, Lua, Modula-2, CLU.
 ● Chameleon languages that support multiple paradigms, including OO.
Tcl stands out among these for TclOO, a hybrid object system that
supports both prototype-based programming and class-based OO.

Popularity and reception[edit]

The TIOBE programming language popularity index graph from 2002 to 2023. In the 2000s the
object-oriented Java (orange) and the procedural C (dark blue) competed for the top position.

Many widely used languages, such as C++, Java, and Python, provide object-
oriented features. Although in the past object-oriented programming was widely
accepted,[50] more recently essays criticizing object-oriented programming and
recommending the avoidance of these features (generally in favor of functional
programming) have been very popular in the developer community.[51] Paul
Graham has suggested that OOP's popularity within large companies is due to
"large (and frequently changing) groups of mediocre programmers". According
to Graham, the discipline imposed by OOP prevents any one programmer from
"doing too much damage".[52] Eric S. Raymond, a Unix programmer and open-
source software advocate, has been critical of claims that present object-oriented
programming as the "One True Solution".[46]

Richard Feldman argues that these languages may have improved their
modularity by adding OO features, but they became popular for reasons other
than being object-oriented.[53] In an article, Lawrence Krubner claimed that
compared to other languages (LISP dialects, functional languages, etc.) OOP
languages have no unique strengths, and inflict a heavy burden of unneeded
complexity.[54] A study by Potok et al. has shown no significant difference in
productivity between OOP and procedural approaches. [55] Luca Cardelli has
claimed that OOP code is "intrinsically less efficient" than procedural code and
that OOP can take longer to compile.[41]

OOP in dynamic languages[edit]

In recent years, object-oriented programming has become especially popular in
dynamic programming languages. Python, PowerShell, Ruby and Groovy are
dynamic languages built on OOP principles, while Perl and PHP have been
adding object-oriented features since Perl 5 and PHP 4, and ColdFusion since
version 6.

The Document Object Model of HTML, XHTML, and XML documents on the
Internet has bindings to the popular JavaScript/ECMAScript language. JavaScript
is perhaps the best known prototype-based programming language, which
employs cloning from prototypes rather than inheriting from a class (contrast to
class-based programming). Another scripting language that takes this approach
is Lua.

OOP in a network protocol[edit]

The messages that flow between computers to request services in a client-server

environment can be designed as the linearizations of objects defined by class
objects known to both the client and the server. For example, a simple linearized
object would consist of a length field, a code point identifying the class, and a
data value. A more complex example would be a command consisting of the
length and code point of the command and values consisting of linearized
objects representing the command's parameters. Each such command must be
directed by the server to an object whose class (or superclass) recognizes the
command and can provide the requested service. Clients and servers are best
modeled as complex object-oriented structures. Distributed Data Management
Architecture (DDM) took this approach and used class objects to define objects
at four levels of a formal hierarchy:

● Fields defining the data values that form messages, such as their
length, code point and data values.
● Objects and collections of objects similar to what would be found in a
Smalltalk program for messages and parameters.
● Managers similar to IBM i Objects, such as a directory to files and files
consisting of metadata and records. Managers conceptually provide
memory and processing resources for their contained objects.
● A client or server consisting of all the managers necessary to
implement a full processing environment, supporting such aspects as
directory services, security, and concurrency control.

The initial version of DDM defined distributed file services. It was later extended
to be the foundation of Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA).
Design patterns[edit]

Challenges of object-oriented design are addressed by several approaches. The

most common is known as the design patterns codified by Gamma et al.. More
broadly, the term "design patterns" can be used to refer to any general,
repeatable, solution pattern to a commonly occurring problem in software design.
Some of these commonly occurring problems have implications and solutions
particular to object-oriented development.

Inheritance and behavioral subtyping[edit]

See also: Object-oriented design

It is intuitive to assume that inheritance creates a semantic "is a" relationship,

and thus to infer that objects instantiated from subclasses can always be safely
used instead of those instantiated from the superclass. This intuition is
unfortunately false in most OOP languages, in particular in all those that allow
mutable objects. Subtype polymorphism as enforced by the type checker in OOP
languages (with mutable objects) cannot guarantee behavioral subtyping in any
context. Behavioral subtyping is undecidable in general, so it cannot be
implemented by a program (compiler). Class or object hierarchies must be
carefully designed, considering possible incorrect uses that cannot be detected
syntactically. This issue is known as the Liskov substitution principle.

Gang of Four design patterns[edit]

Main article: Design pattern (computer science)

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software is an influential

book published in 1994 by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and
John Vlissides, often referred to humorously as the "Gang of Four". Along with
exploring the capabilities and pitfalls of object-oriented programming, it
describes 23 common programming problems and patterns for solving them.

The book describes the following patterns:

● Creational patterns (5): Factory method pattern, Abstract factory

pattern, Singleton pattern, Builder pattern, Prototype pattern
 ● Structural patterns (7): Adapter pattern, Bridge pattern, Composite
pattern, Decorator pattern, Facade pattern, Flyweight pattern, Proxy
pattern
● Behavioral patterns (11): Chain-of-responsibility pattern, Command
pattern, Interpreter pattern, Iterator pattern, Mediator pattern, Memento
pattern, Observer pattern, State pattern, Strategy pattern, Template
method pattern, Visitor pattern

Object-orientation and databases[edit]

Main articles: Object-relational impedance mismatch, Object-relational

mapping, and Object database

Both object-oriented programming and relational database management systems

(RDBMSs) are extremely common in software today. Since relational databases
do not store objects directly (though some RDBMSs have object-oriented
features to approximate this), there is a general need to bridge the two worlds.
The problem of bridging object-oriented programming accesses and data
patterns with relational databases is known as object-relational impedance
mismatch. There are some approaches to cope with this problem, but no general
solution without downsides.[56] One of the most common approaches is object-
relational mapping, as found in IDE languages such as Visual FoxPro and
libraries such as Java Data Objects and Ruby on Rails' ActiveRecord.

There are also object databases that can be used to replace RDBMSs, but these
have not been as technically and commercially successful as RDBMSs.

Real-world modeling and relationships[edit]

OOP can be used to associate real-world objects and processes with digital
counterparts. However, not everyone agrees that OOP facilitates direct real-world
mapping or that real-world mapping is even a worthy goal; Bertrand Meyer
argues in Object-Oriented Software Construction[57] that a program is not a model
of the world but a model of some part of the world; "Reality is a cousin twice
removed". At the same time, some principal limitations of OOP have been noted.
[58]
For example, the circle-ellipse problem is difficult to handle using OOP's
concept of inheritance.

However, Niklaus Wirth (who popularized the adage now known as Wirth's law:
"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster") said of
OOP in his paper, "Good Ideas through the Looking Glass", "This paradigm
closely reflects the structure of systems 'in the real world', and it is therefore well
suited to model complex systems with complex behaviors" [59] (contrast KISS
principle).

Steve Yegge and others noted that natural languages lack the OOP approach of
strictly prioritizing things (objects/nouns) before actions (methods/verbs).[60] This
problem may cause OOP to suffer more convoluted solutions than procedural
programming.[61]

OOP and control flow[edit]

OOP was developed to increase the reusability and maintainability of source

code.[62] Transparent representation of the control flow had no priority and was
meant to be handled by a compiler. With the increasing relevance of parallel
hardware and multithreaded coding, developing transparent control flow
becomes more important, something hard to achieve with OOP. [63][64][65][66]

Responsibility- vs. data-driven design[edit]

Responsibility-driven design defines classes in terms of a contract, that is, a

class should be defined around a responsibility and the information that it
shares. This is contrasted by Wirfs-Brock and Wilkerson with data-driven design,
where classes are defined around the data-structures that must be held. The
authors hold that responsibility-driven design is preferable.

SOLID and GRASP guidelines[edit]

SOLID is a mnemonic invented by Michael Feathers which spells out five

software engineering design principles:

● Single responsibility principle

● Open/closed principle
● Liskov substitution principle
● Interface segregation principle
● Dependency inversion principle

GRASP (General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns) is another set of

guidelines advocated by Craig Larman.
Formal semantics[edit]

See also: Formal semantics of programming languages

Objects are the run-time entities in an object-oriented system. They may

represent a person, a place, a bank account, a table of data, or any item that the
program has to handle.

There have been several attempts at formalizing the concepts used in object-
oriented programming. The following concepts and constructs have been used
as interpretations of OOP concepts:

● co algebraic data types[67]

● recursive types
● encapsulated state
● inheritance
● records are the basis for understanding objects if function literals can
be stored in fields (like in functional-programming languages), but the
actual calculi need be considerably more complex to incorporate
essential features of OOP. Several extensions of System F<: that deal
with mutable objects have been studied;[68] these allow both subtype
polymorphism and parametric polymorphism (generics)

Attempts to find a consensus definition or theory behind objects have not proven
very successful (however, see Abadi & Cardelli, A Theory of Objects[68] for formal
definitions of many OOP concepts and constructs), and often diverge widely. For
example, some definitions focus on mental activities, and some on program
structuring. One of the simpler definitions is that OOP is the act of using "map"
data structures or arrays that can contain functions and pointers to other maps,
all with some syntactic and scoping sugar on top. Inheritance can be performed
by cloning the maps (sometimes called "prototyping").

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Object-oriented" redirects here. For other meanings of object-oriented, see

Object-orientation.

UML notation for a class. This Button class has variables for data, and
functions. Through inheritance, a subclass can be created as a subset of the Button class. Objects
are instances of a class.
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the
concept of objects,[1] which can contain data and code: data in the form of fields
(often known as attributes or properties), and code in the form of procedures
(often known as methods). In OOP, computer programs are designed by making
them out of objects that interact with one another. [2][3]

Many of the most widely used programming languages (such as C++, Java,[4]
Python, etc.) are multi-paradigm and they support object-oriented programming
to a greater or lesser degree, typically in combination with imperative
programming, procedural programming and functional programming.

Significant object-oriented languages include Ada, ActionScript, C++, Common

Lisp, C#, Dart, Eiffel, Fortran 2003, Haxe, Java,[4] Kotlin, Logo, MATLAB,
Objective-C, Object Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Raku, Ruby, Scala, SIMSCRIPT,
Simula, Smalltalk, Swift, Vala and Visual Basic.NET.

History[edit]

Terminology invoking "objects" in the modern sense of object-oriented

programming made its first appearance at the artificial intelligence group at MIT
in the late 1950s and early 1960s. "Object" referred to LISP atoms with identified
properties (attributes).[5][6] Another early MIT example was Sketchpad created by
Ivan Sutherland in 1960–1961; in the glossary of the 1963 technical report based
on his dissertation about Sketchpad, Sutherland defined notions of "object" and
"instance" (with the class concept covered by "master" or "definition"), albeit
specialized to graphical interaction.[7] Also, in 1968, an MIT ALGOL version, AED-
0, established a direct link between data structures ("plexes", in that dialect) and
procedures, prefiguring what were later termed "messages", "methods", and
"member functions".[8][9] Topics such as data abstraction and modular
programming were common points of discussion at this time.

Independently of later MIT work such as AED, Simula was developed during the
years 1961–1967.[8] Simula introduced important concepts that are today an
essential part of object-oriented programming, such as class and object,
inheritance, and dynamic binding.[10] The object-oriented Simula programming
language was used mainly by researchers involved with physical modelling, such
as models to study and improve the movement of ships and their content through
cargo ports.[10]
 I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual computers on a network, only able to
communicate with messages (so messaging came at the very beginning – it took a while to see how to
do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be useful).

[1]
Alan Kay,

Influenced by the work at MIT and the Simula language, in November 1966 Alan
Kay began working on ideas that would eventually be incorporated into the
Smalltalk programming language. Kay used the term "object-oriented
programming" in conversation as early as 1967.[1] Although sometimes called
"the father of object-oriented programming",[11] Alan Kay has differentiated his
notion of OO from the more conventional abstract data type notion of object, and
has implied that the computer science establishment did not adopt his notion. [1]
A 1976 MIT memo co-authored by Barbara Liskov lists Simula 67, CLU, and
Alphard as object-oriented languages, but does not mention Smalltalk. [12]

In the 1970s, the first version of the Smalltalk programming language was
developed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls and Adele Goldberg.
Smalltalk-72 included a programming environment and was dynamically typed,
and at first was interpreted, not compiled. Smalltalk became noted for its
application of object orientation at the language-level and its graphical
development environment. Smalltalk went through various versions and interest
in the language grew.[13] While Smalltalk was influenced by the ideas introduced
in Simula 67 it was designed to be a fully dynamic system in which classes could
be created and modified dynamically.[14]

During the late 1970s and 1980s, object-oriented programming rose to

prominence. The Flavors object-oriented Lisp was developed starting 1979,
introducing multiple inheritance and mixins.[15] In 1981, Goldberg edited the
August issue of Byte Magazine, introducing Smalltalk and object-oriented
programming to a wide audience.[16] LOOPS, the object system for Interlisp-D,
was influenced by Smalltalk and Flavors, and a paper about it was published in
1982.[17] In 1986, the Association for Computing Machinery organized the first
Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and
Applications (OOPSLA), which was attended by 1,000 people. Among other
developments was the Common Lisp Object System, which integrates functional
programming and object-oriented programming and allows extension via a Meta-
object protocol. In the 1980s, there were a few attempts to design processor
architectures that included hardware support for objects in memory but these
were not successful. Examples include the Intel iAPX 432 and the Linn Smart
Rekursiv.
In the mid-1980s Objective-C was developed by Brad Cox, who had used
Smalltalk at ITT Inc.. Bjarne Stroustrup, who had used Simula for his PhD thesis,
created the object-oriented C++.[13] In 1985, Bertrand Meyer also produced the
first design of the Eiffel language. Focused on software quality, Eiffel is a purely
object-oriented programming language and a notation supporting the entire
software lifecycle. Meyer described the Eiffel software development method,
based on a small number of key ideas from software engineering and computer
science, in Object-Oriented Software Construction. Essential to the quality focus
of Eiffel is Meyer's reliability mechanism, Design by Contract, which is an integral
part of both the method and language.

In the early and mid-1990s object-oriented programming developed as the

dominant programming paradigm when programming languages supporting the
techniques became widely available. These included Visual FoxPro 3.0,[18][19][20]
C++,[21] and Delphi[citation needed]. Its dominance was further enhanced by the rising
popularity of graphical user interfaces, which rely heavily upon object-oriented
programming techniques. An example of a closely related dynamic GUI library
and OOP language can be found in the Cocoa frameworks on Mac OS X, written
in Objective-C, an object-oriented, dynamic messaging extension to C based on
Smalltalk. OOP toolkits also enhanced the popularity of event-driven
programming (although this concept is not limited to OOP).

At ETH Zürich, Niklaus Wirth and his colleagues investigated the concept of type
checking across module boundaries. Modula-2 (1978) included this concept, and
their succeeding design, Oberon (1987), included a distinctive approach to object
orientation, classes, and such. Inheritance is not obvious in Wirth's design since
his nomenclature looks in the opposite direction: It is called type extension and
the viewpoint is from the parent down to the inheritor.

Object-oriented features have been added to many previously existing

languages, including Ada, BASIC, Fortran, Pascal, and COBOL. Adding these
features to languages that were not initially designed for them often led to
problems with compatibility and maintainability of code.

More recently, some languages have emerged that are primarily object-oriented,
but that are also compatible with procedural methodology. Two such languages
are Python and Ruby. Probably the most commercially important recent object-
oriented languages are Java, developed by Sun Microsystems, as well as C# and
Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET), both designed for Microsoft's .NET platform. Each of
these two frameworks shows, in its way, the benefit of using OOP by creating an
abstraction from implementation. VB.NET and C# support cross-language
inheritance, allowing classes defined in one language to subclass classes
defined in the other language.
Features[edit]

See also: Comparison of programming languages (object-oriented

programming) and List of object-oriented programming terms

Object-oriented programming uses objects, but not all of the associated

techniques and structures are supported directly in languages that claim to
support OOP. The features listed below are common among languages
considered to be strongly class- and object-oriented (or multi-paradigm with OOP
support), with notable exceptions mentioned.[22][23][24][25] Christopher J. Date
stated that critical comparison of OOP to other technologies, relational in
particular, is difficult because of lack of an agreed-upon and rigorous definition
of OOP.[26]

Shared with non-OOP languages[edit]

● Variables that can store information formatted in a small number of

built-in data types like integers and alphanumeric characters. This may
include data structures like strings, lists, and hash tables that are either
built-in or result from combining variables using memory pointers.
● Procedures – also known as functions, methods, routines, or
subroutines – that take input, generate output, and manipulate data.
Modern languages include structured programming constructs like
loops and conditionals.

Modular programming support provides the ability to group procedures into files
and modules for organizational purposes. Modules are namespaced so identifiers
in one module will not conflict with a procedure or variable sharing the same
name in another file or module.

Objects[edit]

Main article: Object (computer science)

An object is a data structure or abstract data type containing fields (state

variables containing data) and methods (subroutines or procedures defining the
object's behavior in code). Fields may also be known as members, attributes, or
properties. Objects are typically stored as contiguous regions of memory.
Objects are accessed somewhat like variables with complex internal structures,
and in many languages are effectively pointers, serving as actual references to a
single instance of said object in memory within a heap or stack.

Objects sometimes correspond to things found in the real world. [27] For example,
a graphics program may have objects such as "circle", "square", and "menu". An
online shopping system might have objects such as "shopping cart",
"customer", and "product". Sometimes objects represent more abstract entities,
like an object that represents an open file, or an object that provides the service
of translating measurements from U.S. customary to metric.

Objects can contain other objects in their instance variables; this is known as
object composition. For example, an object in the Employee class might contain
(either directly or through a pointer) an object in the Address class, in addition to
its own instance variables like "first_name" and "position". Object composition is
used to represent "has-a" relationships: every employee has an address, so
every Employee object has access to a place to store an Address object (either
directly embedded within itself or at a separate location addressed via a pointer).
Date and Darwen have proposed a theoretical foundation that uses OOP as a kind
of customizable type system to support RDBMS, but it forbids object pointers.[28]

The OOP paradigm has been criticized for overemphasizing the use of objects for
software design and modeling at the expense of other important aspects
(computation/algorithms).[29][30] For example, Rob Pike has said that OOP
languages frequently shift the focus from data structures and algorithms to
types.[31] Steve Yegge noted that, as opposed to functional programming:[32]

Object Oriented Programming puts the nouns first and foremost. Why would you
go to such lengths to put one part of speech on a pedestal? Why should one kind
of concept take precedence over another? It's not as if OOP has suddenly made
verbs less important in the way we actually think. It's a strangely skewed
perspective.

Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure, described object systems as overly simplistic

models of the real world. He emphasized the inability of OOP to model time
properly, which is getting increasingly problematic as software systems become
more concurrent.[30]

Alexander Stepanov compares object orientation unfavourably to generic

programming:[29]

I find OOP technically unsound. It attempts to decompose the world in terms of

interfaces that vary on a single type. To deal with the real problems you need
multisorted algebras — families of interfaces that span multiple types. I find OOP
philosophically unsound. It claims that everything is an object. Even if it is true it
is not very interesting — saying that everything is an object is saying nothing at
all.

Inheritance[edit]

OOP languages are diverse, but typically OOP languages allow inheritance for
code reuse and extensibility in the form of either classes or prototypes. These
forms of inheritance are significantly different, but analogous terminology is used
to define the concepts of object and instance.

Class-based[edit]

In class-based programming, the most popular style, each object is required to

be an instance of a particular class. The class defines the data format or type
(including member variables and their types) and available procedures (class
methods or member functions) for a given type or class of object. Objects are
created by calling a special type of method in the class known as a constructor.
Classes may inherit from other classes, so they are arranged in a hierarchy that
represents "is-a-type-of" relationships. For example, class Employee might
inherit from class Person. All the data and methods available to the parent class
also appear in the child class with the same names. For example, class Person
might define variables "first_name" and "last_name" with method
"make_full_name()". These will also be available in class Employee, which might
add the variables "position" and "salary". It is guaranteed that all instances of
class Employee will have the same variables, such as the name, position, and
salary. Procedures and variables can be specific to either the class or the
instance; this leads to the following terms:

● Class variables – belong to the class as a whole; there is only one copy
of each variable, shared across all instances of the class
● Instance variables or attributes – data that belongs to individual
objects; every object has its own copy of each one. All 4 variables
mentioned above (first_name, position etc) are instance variables.
● Member variables – refers to both the class and instance variables that
are defined by a particular class.
● Class methods – belong to the class as a whole and have access to
only class variables and inputs from the procedure call
● Instance methods – belong to individual objects, and have access to
instance variables for the specific object they are called on, inputs, and
class variables
Depending on the definition of the language, subclasses may or may not be able
to override the methods defined by superclasses. Multiple inheritance is allowed
in some languages, though this can make resolving overrides complicated. Some
languages have special support for other concepts like traits and mixins, though,
in any language with multiple inheritance, a mixin is simply a class that does not
represent an is-a-type-of relationship. Mixins are typically used to add the same
methods to multiple classes. For example, class UnicodeConversionMixin might
provide a method unicode_to_ascii() when included in class FileReader and class
WebPageScraper, which do not share a common parent.

Abstract classes cannot be instantiated into objects; they exist only for
inheritance into other "concrete" classes that can be instantiated. In Java, the
final keyword can be used to prevent a class from being subclassed. [33]

Prototype-based[edit]

In contrast, in prototype-based programming, objects are the primary entities.

Generally, the concept of a "class" does not even exist. Rather, the prototype or
parent of an object is just another object to which the object is linked. In Self, an
object may have multiple or no parents,[34] but in the most popular prototype-
based language, Javascript, every object has one prototype link (and only one).
New objects can be created based on already existing objects chosen as their
prototype. You may call two different objects apple and orange a fruit if the object
fruit exists, and both apple and orange have fruit as their prototype. The idea of
the fruit class does not exist explicitly, but can be modeled as the equivalence
class of the objects sharing the same prototype, or as the set of objects
satisfying a certain interface (duck typing). Unlike class-based programming, it is
typically possible in prototype-based languages to define attributes and methods
not shared with other objects; for example, the attribute sugar_content may be
defined in apple but not orange.

Absence[edit]

Some languages like Go do not support inheritance at all. Go states that it is

object-oriented,[35] and Bjarne Stroustrup, author of C++, has stated that it is
possible to do OOP without inheritance.[36] The doctrine of composition over
inheritance advocates implementing has-a relationships using composition
instead of inheritance. For example, instead of inheriting from class Person,
class Employee could give each Employee object an internal Person object,
which it then has the opportunity to hide from external code even if class Person
has many public attributes or methods. Delegation is another language feature
that can be used as an alternative to inheritance.
Rob Pike has criticized the OO mindset for preferring a multilevel type hierarchy
with layered abstractions to a three-line lookup table.[37] He has called object-
oriented programming "the Roman numerals of computing".[38]

Bob Martin states that because they are software, related classes do not
necessarily share the relationships of the things they represent. [39]

Dynamic dispatch/message passing[edit]

It is the responsibility of the object, not any external code, to select the
procedural code to execute in response to a method call, typically by looking up
the method at run time in a table associated with the object. This feature is known
as dynamic dispatch. If the call variability relies on more than the single type of
the object on which it is called (i.e. at least one other parameter object is involved
in the method choice), one speaks of multiple dispatch. A method call is also
known as message passing. It is conceptualized as a message (the name of the
method and its input parameters) being passed to the object for dispatch.

Dispatch interacts with inheritance; if a method is not present in a given object or

class, the dispatch is delegated to its parent object or class, and so on, going up
the chain of inheritance.

Data abstraction and encapsulation[edit]

Data abstraction is a design pattern in which data are visible only to semantically
related functions, to prevent misuse. The success of data abstraction leads to
frequent incorporation of data hiding as a design principle in object-oriented and
pure functional programming. Similarly, encapsulation prevents external code
from being concerned with the internal workings of an object. This facilitates
code refactoring, for example allowing the author of the class to change how
objects of that class represent their data internally without changing any external
code (as long as "public" method calls work the same way). It also encourages
programmers to put all the code that is concerned with a certain set of data in the
same class, which organizes it for easy comprehension by other programmers.
Encapsulation is a technique that encourages decoupling.

In object oriented programming, objects provide a layer which can be used to

separate internal from external code and implement abstraction and
encapsulation. External code can only use an object by calling a specific
instance method with a certain set of input parameters, reading an instance
variable, or writing to an instance variable. A program may create many instances
of objects as it runs, which operate independently. This technique, it is claimed,
allows easy re-use of the same procedures and data definitions for different sets
of data, in addition to potentially mirroring real-world relationships intuitively.
Rather than utilizing database tables and programming subroutines, the
developer utilizes objects the user may be more familiar with: objects from their
application domain.[40] These claims that the OOP paradigm enhances reusability
and modularity have been criticized.[41][42]

If a class does not allow calling code to access internal object data and permits
access through methods only, this is also a form of information hiding. Some
languages (Java, for example) let classes enforce access restrictions explicitly,
for example, denoting internal data with the private keyword and designating
methods intended for use by code outside the class with the public keyword.[43]
Methods may also be designed public, private, or intermediate levels such as
protected (which allows access from the same class and its subclasses, but not
objects of a different class).[43] In other languages (like Python) this is enforced
only by convention (for example, private methods may have names that start
with an underscore). In C#, Swift & Kotlin languages, internal keyword permits
access only to files present in the same assembly, package, or module as that of
the class.[44]

In programming languages, particularly object-oriented ones, the emphasis on

abstraction is vital. Object-oriented languages extend the notion of type to
incorporate data abstraction, highlighting the significance of restricting access to
internal data through methods.[45] Eric S. Raymond has written that object-
oriented programming languages tend to encourage thickly layered programs
that destroy transparency.[46] Raymond compares this unfavourably to the
approach taken with Unix and the C programming language.[46]

The "open/closed principle" advocates that classes and functions "should be

open for extension, but closed for modification". Luca Cardelli has claimed that
OOP languages have "extremely poor modularity properties with respect to class
extension and modification", and tend to be extremely complex. [41] The latter
point is reiterated by Joe Armstrong, the principal inventor of Erlang, who is
quoted as saying:[42]

The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit
environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what
you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.
Leo Brodie has suggested a connection between the standalone nature of
objects and a tendency to duplicate code[47] in violation of the don't repeat
yourself principle[48] of software development.

Polymorphism[edit]

Subtyping – a form of polymorphism – is when calling code can be independent

of which class in the supported hierarchy it is operating on – the parent class or
one of its descendants. Meanwhile, the same operation name among objects in
an inheritance hierarchy may behave differently.

For example, objects of the type Circle and Square are derived from a common
class called Shape. The Draw function for each type of Shape implements what is
necessary to draw itself while calling code can remain indifferent to the particular
type of Shape being drawn.

This is another type of abstraction that simplifies code external to the class
hierarchy and enables strong separation of concerns.

Open recursion[edit]

A common feature of objects is that methods are attached to them and can
access and modify the object's data fields. In this brand of OOP, there is usually
a special name such as this or self used to refer to the current object. In
languages that support open recursion, object methods can call other methods
on the same object (including themselves) using this name. This variable is late-
bound; it allows a method defined in one class to invoke another method that is
defined later, in some subclass thereof.

OOP languages[edit]

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See also: List of object-oriented programming languages

Simula (1967) is generally accepted as being the first language with the primary
features of an object-oriented language. It was created for making simulation
programs, in which what came to be called objects were the most important
information representation. Smalltalk (1972 to 1980) is another early example and
the one with which much of the theory of OOP was developed. Concerning the
degree of object orientation, the following distinctions can be made:

● Languages called "pure" OO languages, because everything in them is

treated consistently as an object, from primitives such as characters
and punctuation, all the way up to whole classes, prototypes, blocks,
modules, etc. They were designed specifically to facilitate, even
enforce, OO methods. Examples: Ruby, Scala, Smalltalk, Eiffel,
Emerald,[49] JADE, Self, Raku.
● Languages designed mainly for OO programming, but with some
procedural elements. Examples: Java, Python, C++, C#, Delphi/Object
Pascal, VB.NET.
● Languages that are historically procedural languages, but have been
extended with some OO features. Examples: PHP, JavaScript, Perl,
Visual Basic (derived from BASIC), MATLAB, COBOL 2002, Fortran
2003, ABAP, Ada 95, Pascal.
● Languages with most of the features of objects (classes, methods,
inheritance), but in a distinctly original form. Examples: Oberon
(Oberon-1 or Oberon-2).
● Languages with abstract data type support which may be used to
resemble OO programming, but without all features of object-
orientation. This includes object-based and prototype-based languages.
Examples: JavaScript, Lua, Modula-2, CLU.
● Chameleon languages that support multiple paradigms, including OO.
Tcl stands out among these for TclOO, a hybrid object system that
supports both prototype-based programming and class-based OO.

Popularity and reception[edit]

 The TIOBE programming language popularity index graph from 2002 to 2023. In the 2000s the
object-oriented Java (orange) and the procedural C (dark blue) competed for the top position.

Many widely used languages, such as C++, Java, and Python, provide object-
oriented features. Although in the past object-oriented programming was widely
accepted,[50] more recently essays criticizing object-oriented programming and
recommending the avoidance of these features (generally in favor of functional
programming) have been very popular in the developer community.[51] Paul
Graham has suggested that OOP's popularity within large companies is due to
"large (and frequently changing) groups of mediocre programmers". According
to Graham, the discipline imposed by OOP prevents any one programmer from
"doing too much damage".[52] Eric S. Raymond, a Unix programmer and open-
source software advocate, has been critical of claims that present object-oriented
programming as the "One True Solution".[46]

Richard Feldman argues that these languages may have improved their
modularity by adding OO features, but they became popular for reasons other
than being object-oriented.[53] In an article, Lawrence Krubner claimed that
compared to other languages (LISP dialects, functional languages, etc.) OOP
languages have no unique strengths, and inflict a heavy burden of unneeded
complexity.[54] A study by Potok et al. has shown no significant difference in
productivity between OOP and procedural approaches. [55] Luca Cardelli has
claimed that OOP code is "intrinsically less efficient" than procedural code and
that OOP can take longer to compile.[41]

OOP in dynamic languages[edit]

In recent years, object-oriented programming has become especially popular in

dynamic programming languages. Python, PowerShell, Ruby and Groovy are
dynamic languages built on OOP principles, while Perl and PHP have been
adding object-oriented features since Perl 5 and PHP 4, and ColdFusion since
version 6.

The Document Object Model of HTML, XHTML, and XML documents on the
Internet has bindings to the popular JavaScript/ECMAScript language. JavaScript
is perhaps the best known prototype-based programming language, which
employs cloning from prototypes rather than inheriting from a class (contrast to
class-based programming). Another scripting language that takes this approach
is Lua.

OOP in a network protocol[edit]

The messages that flow between computers to request services in a client-server

environment can be designed as the linearizations of objects defined by class
objects known to both the client and the server. For example, a simple linearized
object would consist of a length field, a code point identifying the class, and a
data value. A more complex example would be a command consisting of the
length and code point of the command and values consisting of linearized
objects representing the command's parameters. Each such command must be
directed by the server to an object whose class (or superclass) recognizes the
command and can provide the requested service. Clients and servers are best
modeled as complex object-oriented structures. Distributed Data Management
Architecture (DDM) took this approach and used class objects to define objects
at four levels of a formal hierarchy:

● Fields defining the data values that form messages, such as their
length, code point and data values.
● Objects and collections of objects similar to what would be found in a
Smalltalk program for messages and parameters.
● Managers similar to IBM i Objects, such as a directory to files and files
consisting of metadata and records. Managers conceptually provide
memory and processing resources for their contained objects.
● A client or server consisting of all the managers necessary to
implement a full processing environment, supporting such aspects as
directory services, security, and concurrency control.

The initial version of DDM defined distributed file services. It was later extended
to be the foundation of Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA).

Design patterns[edit]

Challenges of object-oriented design are addressed by several approaches. The

most common is known as the design patterns codified by Gamma et al.. More
broadly, the term "design patterns" can be used to refer to any general,
repeatable, solution pattern to a commonly occurring problem in software design.
Some of these commonly occurring problems have implications and solutions
particular to object-oriented development.

Inheritance and behavioral subtyping[edit]

See also: Object-oriented design

It is intuitive to assume that inheritance creates a semantic "is a" relationship,

and thus to infer that objects instantiated from subclasses can always be safely
used instead of those instantiated from the superclass. This intuition is
unfortunately false in most OOP languages, in particular in all those that allow
mutable objects. Subtype polymorphism as enforced by the type checker in OOP
languages (with mutable objects) cannot guarantee behavioral subtyping in any
context. Behavioral subtyping is undecidable in general, so it cannot be
implemented by a program (compiler). Class or object hierarchies must be
carefully designed, considering possible incorrect uses that cannot be detected
syntactically. This issue is known as the Liskov substitution principle.

Gang of Four design patterns[edit]

Main article: Design pattern (computer science)

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software is an influential

book published in 1994 by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and
John Vlissides, often referred to humorously as the "Gang of Four". Along with
exploring the capabilities and pitfalls of object-oriented programming, it
describes 23 common programming problems and patterns for solving them.

The book describes the following patterns:

● Creational patterns (5): Factory method pattern, Abstract factory

pattern, Singleton pattern, Builder pattern, Prototype pattern
● Structural patterns (7): Adapter pattern, Bridge pattern, Composite
pattern, Decorator pattern, Facade pattern, Flyweight pattern, Proxy
pattern
● Behavioral patterns (11): Chain-of-responsibility pattern, Command
pattern, Interpreter pattern, Iterator pattern, Mediator pattern, Memento
pattern, Observer pattern, State pattern, Strategy pattern, Template
method pattern, Visitor pattern

Object-orientation and databases[edit]

 Main articles: Object-relational impedance mismatch, Object-relational
mapping, and Object database

Both object-oriented programming and relational database management systems

(RDBMSs) are extremely common in software today. Since relational databases
do not store objects directly (though some RDBMSs have object-oriented
features to approximate this), there is a general need to bridge the two worlds.
The problem of bridging object-oriented programming accesses and data
patterns with relational databases is known as object-relational impedance
mismatch. There are some approaches to cope with this problem, but no general
solution without downsides.[56] One of the most common approaches is object-
relational mapping, as found in IDE languages such as Visual FoxPro and
libraries such as Java Data Objects and Ruby on Rails' ActiveRecord.

There are also object databases that can be used to replace RDBMSs, but these
have not been as technically and commercially successful as RDBMSs.

Real-world modeling and relationships[edit]

OOP can be used to associate real-world objects and processes with digital
counterparts. However, not everyone agrees that OOP facilitates direct real-world
mapping or that real-world mapping is even a worthy goal; Bertrand Meyer
argues in Object-Oriented Software Construction[57] that a program is not a model
of the world but a model of some part of the world; "Reality is a cousin twice
removed". At the same time, some principal limitations of OOP have been noted.
[58]
For example, the circle-ellipse problem is difficult to handle using OOP's
concept of inheritance.

However, Niklaus Wirth (who popularized the adage now known as Wirth's law:
"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster") said of
OOP in his paper, "Good Ideas through the Looking Glass", "This paradigm
closely reflects the structure of systems 'in the real world', and it is therefore well
suited to model complex systems with complex behaviors" [59] (contrast KISS
principle).

Steve Yegge and others noted that natural languages lack the OOP approach of
strictly prioritizing things (objects/nouns) before actions (methods/verbs).[60] This
problem may cause OOP to suffer more convoluted solutions than procedural
programming.[61]

OOP and control flow[edit]

OOP was developed to increase the reusability and maintainability of source
code.[62] Transparent representation of the control flow had no priority and was
meant to be handled by a compiler. With the increasing relevance of parallel
hardware and multithreaded coding, developing transparent control flow
becomes more important, something hard to achieve with OOP. [63][64][65][66]

Responsibility- vs. data-driven design[edit]

Responsibility-driven design defines classes in terms of a contract, that is, a

class should be defined around a responsibility and the information that it
shares. This is contrasted by Wirfs-Brock and Wilkerson with data-driven design,
where classes are defined around the data-structures that must be held. The
authors hold that responsibility-driven design is preferable.

SOLID and GRASP guidelines[edit]

SOLID is a mnemonic invented by Michael Feathers which spells out five

software engineering design principles:

● Single responsibility principle

● Open/closed principle
● Liskov substitution principle
● Interface segregation principle
● Dependency inversion principle

GRASP (General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns) is another set of

guidelines advocated by Craig Larman.

Formal semantics[edit]

See also: Formal semantics of programming languages

Objects are the run-time entities in an object-oriented system. They may

represent a person, a place, a bank account, a table of data, or any item that the
program has to handle.

There have been several attempts at formalizing the concepts used in object-
oriented programming. The following concepts and constructs have been used
as interpretations of OOP concepts:
 ● co algebraic data types[67]
● recursive types
● encapsulated state
● inheritance
● records are the basis for understanding objects if function literals can
be stored in fields (like in functional-programming languages), but the
actual calculi need be considerably more complex to incorporate
essential features of OOP. Several extensions of System F<: that deal
with mutable objects have been studied;[68] these allow both subtype
polymorphism and parametric polymorphism (generics)

Attempts to find a consensus definition or theory behind objects have not proven
very successful (however, see Abadi & Cardelli, A Theory of Objects[68] for formal
definitions of many OOP concepts and constructs), and often diverge widely. For
example, some definitions focus on mental activities, and some on program
structuring. One of the simpler definitions is that OOP is the act of using "map"
data structures or arrays that can contain functions and pointers to other maps,
all with some syntactic and scoping sugar on top. Inheritance can be performed
by cloning the maps (sometimes called "prototyping").