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My mom subscribed to Byte, and I eagerly awaited every issue. My favorite feature was Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar but I read all of the articles. I was just learni

My mom subscribed to Byte, and I eagerly awaited every issue. My favorite feature was Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar but I read all of the articles. I was just learning BASIC in high school when the Smalltalk article came out. So I have to admit that I was utterly bewildered by OOP. Plus, I had no hope of actually trying to use it on any computer within my reach. Years later, I finally got over the fear of OOP by using languages that let you kind of ease your way into it. Visual Basic was "object based" in that you could use pre-made classes, but had to buy a special version to make your own. Still, understanding the benefits of using classes was a good preparation for making them. Probably the point when I realized that I had been using OOP without knowing it, was when I started doing some moderately complicated programs in LabVIEW.

PaulHoule 4y ago
I borrowed Byte from the public library. I remember being really baffled by this Smalltalk issue. BASIC cast such a shadow over the 8-bit era that no other scripting languages were really significant on micros in the 1980s. In the early 1990s there was Perl, TCL and Lua that came in with the 32-bit age. Visual Basic was particularly interesting because it was tied to an object model that was bigger than Visual Basic itself. That is, you could write COM components in a language like C or C++ and script them in VB. For that matter circa 1990 there were quite a few scientific programming systems that revolved around scripting languages like MATLAB and IDL. LabVIEW, however, is in a special category of systems that represent a (usually) real-time calculation with a graph of operators. This kind of system is particularly prevalent today for sound synthesis.