How did companies sell Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) to the masses back in the early 1990s, during the “Peak Of Inflated Expectations” of the OOP hype cycle? We have already seen such an example in the Vidéothèque section of this magazine, in which Steve Jobs would demonstrate how to build an application using objects on a NeXT computer. In this month’s entry, we will learn about OOP concepts from one of Borland’s founders and chairmen, Philippe Kahn himself.
Speaking about which, our host Philippe Kahn is a French entrepreneur and engineer who is also a conservatory-trained musician and an inventor. Talk about a polymath.
And what has Mr. Kahn invented? Believe it or not, he is credited to have invented… the camera phone in 1997. Yes, you heard right; the fact that your iPhone features a camera (which, let us be honest, is one of the driving factors for many users to keep changing phones every year) can be traced back to Mr. Kahn’s own experimentation, whose grainy and admittedly not-in-4K picture of his daughter Sophie is also the first one ever taken with and then shared through a cellphone.
But we digress, as usual. What we want here is to learn how OOP was sold to software developers back in 1991, and for that, we have this month’s Vidéothèque movie: “The World of Objects”. This video dives into a series of conceptual vignettes, explaining various concepts related to OOP: composition, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, all with the unmistakable 1990s style cherished by “Friends” sitcom fans all over the world.
Our host starts by explaining object composition by showing the advantages of hiring professional musicians to compose and play music (even though, to the ears of the author of these lines, he plays very well himself already!) It is also worth mentioning that Mr. Kahn possesses one of the best English American accents I have ever heard from a French-born person (with the exception of actress Eva Green, of course).
Then comes the concepts of encapsulation, shown through a 1960 Chevrolet Corvette; inheritance, shown through his own dog and its recently-born puppies; and polymorphism, shown through… a “multimedia” desktop application that looks strikingly similar to a website of our modern world, all running on a small tablet with a stylus (!), in which the same “show” command displays different media types, all depending on the context and the requirements. There is even a little bit of Lego involved to talk about architecture; how about that for 1991.
As we have often mentioned in the pages of this magazine, it is interesting to observe, from the vantage point of 2025, how natural these concepts sound to us today, and how much inheritance has been thrown out of the window. Most “modern” programming languages nowadays simply do not even feature it, as it has been widely agreed by the development community that it was a distraction, at best. Composition, encapsulation, and polymorphism, however, are all concepts that have passed the test of time. Give us structures in memory, but just do not bother placing them in inheritance structures, thankyousomuch.
And then comes the star-struck section of the movie: short interviews of the special guests of the show, featuring none other than Alan Kay, Marvin Minsky, Bjarne Stroustrup, Joseph Weizenbaum (of “Computer Power and Human Reason” fame), and Niklaus Wirth, each touting this or that advantage of the OOP approach.
Of course, the real purpose of this video was to sell developers some shiny new IDE or library produced by Borland, but the end result was not only colorful, it was also interesting and entertaining. Kudos to the producer team of this little gem.
Watch this month’s Vidéothèque movie, “The World of Objects”, by Philippe Kahn, with guest appearances by Alan Kay, Marvin Minsky, Bjarne Stroustrup, Joseph Weizenbaum, and Niklaus Wirth, on YouTube.
Cover snapshot chosen by the author.