A Brief Survey of Object-Oriented Ideas

Object-oriented programming is a widely known paradigm, supported in many modern programming languages, and is commonly associated with maintainable and understandable programs. To understand what makes up this paradigm and its effect on maintenance and understandability, we conducted a literature survey. Surprisingly, we found that object-oriented programming encompasses diverse sets of features and that there is no consensus on what features are necessary to unambiguously define object-oriented programming. We show that it is difficult to define object-oriented programming, but suggest that this lack of a consensual definition might actually have been the reason for the success of object-oriented programming in modern programming languages.