1. Object Oriented Programming History

The Object-oriented programming was first introduced at MIT in the 1950’s, which gained speed in the 1970’s.

In the 1980’s Bjarne Stroustrup integrated OOP into C Language and called it C++. It was the first object-oriented language that was widely used and was successful commercially.

In 1990, James Gosling of Sun Micro Systems developed a simple version of C++ called Java and it was widely used to develop applications on internet, as Internet became a rage in those times.

For an interesting reading on OOP please visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming (Links to an external site.) 

The Python language was developed by Guido van Rossum in 1989 and by 1990 it had the capability for Object-oriented programming.

So what is OOP ?

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of objects, which may contain data, in the form of fields, often known as attributes and code, in the form of procedures, often known as methods.

Any Object-oriented programming language(OOP) should support the following concepts:

  1. Encapsulation - Ability to model abstract real world objects (characteristics(attributes) and behavior (methods)) and hide unnecessary information.
  2. Inheritance - Ability to create sub-classes from existing classes.
  3. Polymorphism - Ability of an object to adapt the code to the type of the data it is processing.

Python supports all the above concepts and so it is an OOP language. 

Other OOP languages are Java, C++, C#, Smalltalk etc.