Week 6: My Summary of Object-Oriented Programming Concepts

           The majority of the semester, except for this week and last week when we first dipped our toes with recursion, consisted of learning exactly what object-oriented programming is. If I were a betting man I would say that the expectation of this course is that we are able to fully understand and be able to explain what object-oriented programming, or “OOP” for short, is. Here is my best shot at it.

           The name of it is pretty self-explanatory. OOP is a type of programming process that revolves around devising procedures using objects as the information to solve real-life problems. Whenever the instructor threw around big words such as “Abstract Data Types” or “methods”, I reminded myself of the actual “Object-Oriented” part of the OOP name. What are objects? They are basically chunks of data you can store, manipulate, and extract. They can be Python built-in data types, such as integers, strings, and Boolean values, or you could even make your own. These are called Abstract Data Types, or “ADTs” for short. These store the intended meaning of the data it stores and what to do with them. Each ADT is organized as a “class”, which contains and neatly organizes “methods”. These are functions that can either report some property of the object the class represents, or mutate it. This all seemed super complicated to me at first because just the terms and concepts seemed super abstract. I fixed this by diving into analyzing examples, which the instructor was more than generous about. One of the examples was a Point object. A “Point” has coordinates, which has to be initialized first (I will explain later how that works). We also want its distance from the origin. A class would provide these services, both initializing the coordinates and returning its distance from the origin, through the methods that it houses. Not so hard to understand anymore, eh? Of course, we can get into much more detail with __eq__ and ___repr__ special methods and how to call upon the methods to use their services but the fundamental idea is that the classes and methods all revolve around how to perform operations with and/or on the main object that they were created to do, hence OOP.

           Inheritance, though, is a concept worth mentioning and the explanation of OOP would not be complete without it. Sometimes, we have an object that is kind of like one thing but is more specific. For example, a square and a triangle are shapes but they are more specific in that they are specific shapes. They share general attributes but determining them might require operations specific to their needs. The solution here is to create a parent class Shape and still implement methods. Then we can call Square and Triangle “subclasses”, which means that they inherit the methods but when we program the subclasses, we can override the inherited methods and add new methods that are only for that subclass. The endgame is that programmers are able to fully customize each class while doing minimal work if possible. Sounds like a perfect deal to me.

           Hopefully my explanation of OOP was clear enough for my classmates to understand. I know this stuff will come up on the final exam so I definitely look forward to coming back to this entry to review OOP concepts. I feel I can do quite a few things with this knowledge. As a matter of fact, my group (with Lukas and Jovan) did quite well in the first assignment, which dealt with practicing OOP so I think I’m set. I now look forward to more recursion to add to my toolbox along with OOP.