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by grahamburger
3702 days ago
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Well I'm not exactly a teacher or an expert, just an armchair critic - so I won't pretend that my ideas will be revolutionary or even all that good :) but, because this is something I've been thinking about recently, I'll contribute. My oldest son is 5 and I've been thinking about how I'll start to teach him programming, if he finds himself so inclined. Right now I'm thinking I'll start by working through a Christmas wish list program with him. For OOP specifically, the wish list items might make a good (if simplified) example of classes/objects, with maybe some inheritance for 'things I would like' vs 'things I would like to give to other people' vs 'things I would like to do' etc. Essentially my gripe with the animal and car analogies is exactly what Alex3917 wrote above - you're (almost?) never going to actually implement anything like a car on an animal in a real program. And if you do, you're almost certainly not going to give it methods like 'Honk' and 'Meow' (which is exactly how OOP was described in my first class on the subject.) It's not that they're bad analogies - in fact it's almost that they're too good of analogies. They represent the OOP concepts very well, just not the practical usage of the concepts. Actually the truth is I'm a little bit disillusioned with OOP altogether, and it seems like there's a lot of movement in the industry away from OOP with things like Go, Rust and other more purely functional languages. |
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Did you mean "on" or "or"?
Using OOP to implement a vehicle is a no-brainer. It's a completely standard model for games.
Extending the animal class to make a car would be weird though.
One point of OOP isn't that you make classes, but that the classes you make can be easily duplicated and automated.
So you can make an animal with a few simple behaviours, use your animal prototype to make a herd or flock, and suddenly you've got emergent semi-intelligence, which you can define by changing a few lines in the prototype.
It's not just a way of giving properties to something that's kind of like a real object - it's a way of simplifying automation and bulk updates of related entities.