do...until wisdom needed...

[Andrew Dalke]

>Douglas Alan wrote:
>>It grew out of Simula-67 too.  The first true OO language was
>>Smalltalk, which grew out of Lisp and Simula-67, and was invented in
>>the '70's.  OO made it's way back into Lisp in about two hours (okay
>>slight exaggeration, but not by much) after the invention of
>>Smalltalk.

Me, referencing an xemacs link
>So I take that to mean the infusion of OO programming into
>Lisp did not make strong headway until years after Smalltalk
>came out.

Here's another refererence I came across which suggests that OO
in Lisp wasn't common until the mid-80's.  This is from Richard
Gabriel's book "Patterns of Software" and the essay is "Into the
Ground: C++", p201 in my book.

  We took our presentation to potential customers, approaching
  them by saying that we thought OO was the coming thing, that
  C++ was the coming OO language, and that the complexity of the
  language made a development environment necessary.

The date is about 1990, so Doug's statement that OO wasn't
becoming popular for most developmnet until the '90s is more correct
than my belief it was the late '80s.

This essay was written by one of the founders of Lucid, a commercial
Lisp company.  It implies that OO wasn't common in Common Lisp
systems, which would mean that OO programming wasn't a frequently
used paradigm in Lisp programming of the time.

That's not saying it wasn't used, as your link to Paul Graham's
"Being Popular" make mention of OO research done with Lisp.  I'm
just suggesting that popular use of OO programming in Lisp occured
at roughly the same time as OO programming using other languages
became popular, and not in the mid-70s.

Or it could be that Gabriel was obscuring the popularity of OO
programming in Lisp for marketing reasons; to hype people's
interest in Lucid's C++ environment.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at acm.org