In a paper entitled "Classes vs. Prototypes: Some Philosophical and Historical Observations" and published in 1996, Antero Taivalsaari draws parallels between the evolution of the philisophy and of the Object-Oriented paradigm in programming.
Indeed, the classification of the world was in the center of interests of philosophers since Plato and Aristote. Taivalsaari argues that the traditional class-based OOP builds upon the principles that have first been described by Plato, while there are more sophisticated approaches to categorization, e.g. the so-called prototype theory, started by Wittgenstein, that lays in the foundations of the prototype-based OOP, like what we find the the modern implementations of the JavaScript language.
Tags: