Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by claystu 3972 days ago
I think objects are intuitive. After all, we live in a world made of objects.

What confuses newcomers is the computer science vocabulary that everyone insists on using when teaching objects. I am a big fan of object oriented programming, but the vocabulary and terrible metaphors of introductory books reads like punishment.

The only language that has done a worse job explaining a simple concept is Lisp with macros. My God! It's like they're trying to keep Macro's a secret.

1 comments

> I think objects are intuitive. After all, we live in a world made of objects.

We do not live in a world made of object in the OOP sense. (On a more fundamental level, we don't live in a world made of objects at all so much as a world we are prone to arbitrarily -- and not always consistently -- break up into objects for the convenience of thinking about it, but those objects still aren't OOP-style objects.)

Your "OOP sense" is exactly what I meant about confusing things with computer science jargon. To a beginner, treating objects as structs with functions is all they need to know.