The Problem of Teaching Object-Oriented Programming, Part I: Languages

Object-oriented programming has, in recent years, become the most influential programming paradigm. It is widely used in education and industry, and almost every university teaches object-orientation somewhere in its curriculum. The software community more or less agrees that teaching object-oriented programming is a good thing. It elegantly supports the concepts that we have been trying to teach for many years, such as well structured programming, modularisation and program design. It also supports techniques for approaching problems that have only more recently made their way into the curriculum: programming in teams, maintenance of large systems and software reuse. In short, object-oriented programming seems to be a good tool for teaching those programming methodologies that we consider important.