Day 2: Clipping Bushes and Other New Tricks

In Edward Scissorhands, a magical moment happens when Edward realizes that he’s come far from the house on the hill and his unique abilities may give him a special place in the existing society.

Anyone with an eye for programming language history has seen this fable played out before. When the object-oriented paradigm was new, the masses could not accept Smalltalk because the paradigm was too new. We needed a language that would let them continue to do procedural programming and experiment with object-oriented ideas. With C++, the new object-oriented tricks could live safely beside the existing C procedural features. The result was that people could start using the new tricks in an old context.

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