8.14. Recap: Functional Component Abstractions

When object-oriented programming went mainstream in the late ’80s and early ’90s, there was great hope that it would usher in an era of reusable software components. It didn’t really work out that way, except in some rare cases, like the windowing APIs of various platforms.

Why did this not happen? There are certainly many reasons, but a likely source is the fact that simple source or binary interoperability protocols never materialized that would glue these components together. The richness of object APIs was the very factor that undermined componentization.