We will describe these ideas in
more detail later. The goal of such practices is to create more robust and reusable modules of code, and hence
improve programming productivity.
In the mid-1980s, Bjarne Stroustrup, at Cambridge University in Britain, invented an object-oriented
language called C++. C++ is a superset of C; any C program is also a C++ program. C++ provides a full set of
46 SOFTWARE [CHAP. 4
object-oriented features, and at one time was called ???C with classes.??? Until Java emerged in the late 1990s, C++
was the most popular object-oriented development language.
The most popular object-oriented language today is Java, which was created by James Gosling and his
colleagues at Sun Microsystems. Java was released by Sun in 1994, and became an immediate hit due to its
appropriateness for web applications, its rich language library, and its hardware independence. Java??™s growth in
use among programmers has been unprecedented for a new language. Today Java and C are the languages most
frequently chosen for new work (http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm).
The variety of third-generation languages today is very great. Some are more successful than others
because they offer unusual expressive power (C, Java), efficiency of execution (C, FORTRAN), a large installed
base of code (Cobol), familiarity (BASIC), portability between computers (Java), object orientation (Java,
C++), or the backing of important sponsors (such as the US Department of Defense sponsorship of ADA).
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