Late Binding - History

History

The term "late binding" dates back to at least the 1960s, where it can be found in Communications of the ACM. The term was widely used to describe languages such as LISP, though usually with negative connotations about performance.

In the 1980s Smalltalk popularized object-oriented programming (OOP) and with it late binding. Dr. Alan Kay once said, "OOP to me means only messaging, local retention, and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them."

In the early to mid-1990s, Microsoft heavily promoted its COM standard as a binary interface between different OOP programming languages. COM programming equally promoted early and late binding, with many languages supporting both at the syntax level.

In 2000, Alex Martelli coined the term "duck typing" to refer to the same concept, but with a different emphasis. While late binding generally focuses on implementation details, duck typing focuses on the ability to ignore types and concentrate on the methods an object currently has.