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Welcome to the forty-ninth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Object-Oriented Programming, featuring a brand new logo and visual style, and starting the 5th year (say what?) of publication of this magazine. In this edition, we apply Gartner's Hype Cycle to OOP and watch its evolution in the past half century; in the Library section, we re-read "Design Patterns" by the Gang of Four; and in the new Vidéothèque section, we review a GOTO Berlin 2017 video by James Coplien.
Even though Marketing buzzwords might have an effect akin to Kryptonite against our readers, we're going to use the famous Gartner's Five-Step Hype Cycle to take a closer look at the practice of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and its various ups and downs in the past 50 years. Remembering that one of the core tenets of this magazine is to make the impossible dialogue possible, the framework provided by Gartner fits this task perfectly well.
For some shameful reason, most probably because of some profound ignorance on our side, we managed to publish four years of this magazine without mentioning James "Jim" ("Cope") Coplien not even once. It is high time to correct this, and there is no better moment to do that than in this issue dedicated to Object-Oriented Programming.
Many different things bear the name "Gang of Four"; however, in this case, we are going to talk about a major bestseller in the history of computer books: "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. There is a high probability that every reader of this article owns, has read, or has at least skimmed through the pages of a GoF book once or twice. The book has been reprinted dozens of times (40 times at least until 2012.) It has been the subject of uncountable articles, videos, panel discussions, and, yes, also attacks.