How does Object Oriented Programming work? What does it do and how is it effective?
In: Technology
The idea is that you can represent things or notions in the world into “classes” then design how these classes relate to other classes. Each class may have data members that represent properties of that object which can be basic programming things like integers and strings or sometimes they may be another class or collection of another class. Then the class specifies functions which may do something useful, perhaps modifying internal data values, creating a new instance of a class, or calculating or returning some value.
Typically object oriented programming involves what programmers called “polymorphism” or the ability to generalize some classes and allow programmers to inherit all the stuff from the general class to describe how their particular version of it works. If used effectively, it allows you to write programs that operate on the higher-level classes, knowing that certain functions and properties are guaranteed to be there, even if you haven’t implemented the concrete instances yet.
It helps in that it allows the programmer to isolate different sections of code (called loose coupling in programming terminology) so that you can make one piece of the application without needing to know everything about all the other pieces of code as well. This is very useful in professional development where you likely have multiple programmers working on different parts at the same time and need to coordinate how everything relates and ties into each other.
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