Why did object-oriented paradigms take so long to go mainstream?

Posted by Earlz on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Earlz
Published on 2012-11-04T05:58:57Z Indexed on 2012/11/04 11:22 UTC
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I read this question and it got me thinking about another fairly recent thing. Object oriented languages. I'm not sure when the first one was created, but why did it take so long before they became mainstream?

C became vastly popular, but didn't become the object-oriented C++ for years(decades?) later
No mainstream language before the 90s was object oriented
Object oriented really seemed to take off with Java and C++ around the same time

Now, my question, why did this take so long? Why wasn't C originally conceived as an object-oriented language? Taking a very small subset of C++ wouldn't have affected the core language a whole lot, so why was this idea not popular until the 90s?

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