Object-orientation

nice chapter on overloading encapsulation:
http://www.cs.rpi.edu/ szymansk/OOF90/Forum.html

important point on Compositional Software Construction (locate and reuse code):
http://g.oswego.edu/dl/html/javaInCS.html

ABSTRACT

I advocate that scientific programming should be done in an object-oriented language, that Java offers researchers an easy-to-use, and very expressive language. Java's World Wide Web capabilities and its portability improve a researcher's ability to maintain his compute environment, collaborate with other researchers, and publish his implementations along with his scientific description. Subroutines in more efficient languages, such as Fortran and C, help to overcome local performance bottlenecks in Java programs.