No, not the National Lampoon movie! This post is a vacation from the predominant way developers view Object Oriented design and development, that is, not only as a design methodology but also as a vehicle for reuse. After a slow start in generating reusable artifacts, the patterns movement has certainly provided a great deal of success in reuse and has greatly influenced, if not dominated, the teaching of Object Oriented design and development.
In the European School of programming, also known as the Scandinavian School of programming design and development is considered to be modeling and simulating a real or imaginary part of the world through objects and classes. The focus was on developing this model, not on reuse. You can find a description of the thought behind it here. Kristen Nygaard is considered to be the founder of the Scandinavian School of programming. His site is fascinating and it is particularly interesting how during his life he combined his work in Object Oriented research and computer science (which he preferred to call Informatics) with his interest in social issues. An example of this unique combination can be found in this paper by Nygaard.
Nygaard along with Ole-Johan Dahl developed the first family of OO languages, Simula. For those of you who are programming language mavens, beta is a more recent effort.
There is much more to say about Nygaard, Dahl and the entire Scandinavian school of programming. In fact I am considering it as a potential book (or at least long paper) project. This will not be the last post on the school in this blog. If you have other links, papers or experience with the Scandinavian/European school of Object Oriented programming and design, share them in a comment. Later!
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