In object-oriented programming, a class is an extensible program-code-template for creating objects, providing initial values for state and implementations of behavior. In many languages, the class name is used as the name for the class, the name for the default constructor of the class, and as the type of objects generated by instantiating the class; these distinct concepts are easily conflated.
Java is a general-purpose programming language that is class-based, object-oriented, and designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is intended to let application developers write once, run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of the underlying computer architecture. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++, but it has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. As of 2019, Java was one of the most popular programming languages in use according to GitHub, particularly for client-server web applications, with a reported 9 million developers.
Ruby is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language. It was designed and developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan.
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language underpinning the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis". It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Diana Merry, Scott Wallace, and others during the 1970s.
Cocoa is Apple's native object-oriented application programming interface (API) for its desktop operating system macOS.
Self is an object-oriented programming language based on the concept of prototypes. Self began as a dialect of Smalltalk, being dynamically typed and using just-in-time compilation (JIT) as well as the prototype-based approach to objects: it was first used as an experimental test system for language design in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2006, Self was still being developed as part of the Klein project, which was a Self virtual machine written fully in Self. The latest version is 2017.1 released in May 2017.
Generic programming is a style of computer programming in which algorithms are written in terms of types to-be-specified-later that are then instantiated when needed for specific types provided as parameters. This approach, pioneered by the ML programming language in 1973, permits writing common functions or types that differ only in the set of types on which they operate when used, thus reducing duplication. Such software entities are known as generics in Python, Ada, C#, Delphi, Eiffel, F#, Java, Nim, Rust, Swift, TypeScript and Visual Basic .NET. They are known as parametric polymorphism in ML, Scala, Julia, and Haskell ; templates in C++ and D; and parameterized types in the influential 1994 book Design Patterns.
In object-oriented programming languages, a mixin is a class that contains methods for use by other classes without having to be the parent class of those other classes. How those other classes gain access to the mixin's methods depends on the language. Mixins are sometimes described as being "included" rather than "inherited".
In computer science, reflection is the ability of a process to examine, introspect, and modify its own structure and behavior.
Object Pascal is an extension to the programming language Pascal that provides object-oriented programming (OOP) features such as classes and methods.
This article compares two programming languages: C# with Java. While the focus of this article is mainly the languages and their features, such a comparison will necessarily also consider some features of platforms and libraries. For a more detailed comparison of the platforms, please see Comparison of the Java and .NET platforms.
In computer science, dynamic dispatch is the process of selecting which implementation of a polymorphic operation to call at run time. It is commonly employed in, and considered a prime characteristic of, object-oriented programming (OOP) languages and systems.
In computer programming, an entry point is where the first instructions of a program are executed, and where the program has access to command line arguments.
C# is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language encompassing strong typing, lexically scoped, imperative, declarative, functional, generic, object-oriented (class-based), and component-oriented programming disciplines. It was developed around 2000 by Microsoft as part of its .NET initiative and later approved as an international standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) in 2002 and ISO in 2003. Mono is the name of the free and open-source project to develop a compiler and runtime for the language. C# is one of the programming languages designed for the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).
JADE is a proprietary object-oriented software development and deployment platform product from the New Zealand-based Jade Software Corporation, first released in 1996. It consists of the JADE programming language, Integrated development environment and debugger, integrated application server and object database management system.
In object-oriented computer programming, an extension method is a method added to an object after the original object was compiled. The modified object is often a class, a prototype or a type. Extension methods are features of some object-oriented programming languages. There is no syntactic difference between calling an extension method and calling a method declared in the type definition.
A symbol in computer programming is a primitive data type whose instances have a unique human-readable form. Symbols can be used as identifiers. In some programming languages, they are called atoms. Uniqueness is enforced by holding them in a symbol table. The most common use of symbols by programmers is for performing language reflection, and most common indirectly is their use to create object linkages.
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data, in the form of fields, and code, in the form of procedures. A feature of objects is that an object's own procedures can access and often modify the data fields of itself. In OOP, computer programs are designed by making them out of objects that interact with one another. OOP languages are diverse, but the most popular ones are class-based, meaning that objects are instances of classes, which also determine their types.
Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. It was the main programming language supported by Apple for macOS, iOS, and their respective application programming interfaces (APIs), Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, until the introduction of Swift in 2014.
Swift is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Apple Inc. for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Linux. Swift is designed to work with Apple's Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks and the large body of existing Objective-C code written for Apple products. It is built with the open source LLVM compiler framework and has been included in Xcode since version 6, released in 2014. On Apple platforms, it uses the Objective-C runtime library which allows C, Objective-C, C++ and Swift code to run within one program.
