Week 6: Summary of Object Oriented Programming Concepts

Hello,

I am going to be summing up what I know from object oriented programming. I will start off by sharing a quote I found:

"Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming language model organized around objects rather than "actions" and data rather than logic. Historically, a program has been viewed as a logical procedure that takes input data, processes it, and produces output data." [1].

Even though I may not know everything about object oriented programming, I can still relate to the quote based off of what we learned in lecture so far. What we have been focusing a lot on so far are creating objects and recognizing what makes up a object. An object has attributes and verbs(actions) which we can implement in to code to 'create' this object.

For example the class Student may have attributes: name, student number, year and grades.
Some verbs may be: find an average mark of the student, enrol the student in a course (may involve another class) and so on.

Also involving inheritance we learn that objects are not entirely unique and that they share common actions. What helps me to think of inheritance is to think of traits being passed down. Such as like species passing down dominant survival characteristics down to future generations in The Theory of Evolution or another example may be parents passing down similar genes to their children.

Thinking about problems using objects is quite tough at first but I am sure over time I will get better designing such programs that uses object oriented programming.

Goals for the future may to learn some procedural programming so I can a have larger perspective of other programming styles.


Rod Mazloomi

1. Margarat Rouse, object-oriented-programming (OOP), <techtarget.com>, August 2008.