Object Oriented Programming

For this week I chose 'The story of object-oriented programming", by medium.com. The blog dives right into the topic by stating that any developer who wants to build a high quality software out to master object-oriented programming concept. I learnt that object-orientation was intended to be closer to the real world and also making it easier. Objects in the real world, could be anything such as a house, car, bike, books etc. Objects have attributes and behaviors, that's how we identify them. Attributes are the properties of a particular object. For instance some attributes of the human race are having a nose, having eyes, having legs and so much more. Behaviors on the other hand are actions that the object performs. It could be displaying a message that is useful to the user, sending and delivering an email when a button is pressed, playing certain theme songs when new levels are reached in a game. Objects do not generate themselves, they come from classes througha process known as instantiation. A class is the home or blueprint where attributes and behaviors live. When an object is made out of a class, it is safe to say that it contains the exact content of that parent class.

In relevance to Software development, there exists four expressions to object oriented programming (OOP) namely, Abstraction, Encapsulation, Polymorphism and Inheritance. Abstraction means hiding the implementation details of a particular class. Basically, data and information that is irrelevant to the user is not presented to him/her.  A commonly used example is  about cars and their technical functionality such as burning oil in the combustion engine. As the car executes its source code, the driver does not need to know what events are happening under the hood in full detail.

Encapsulation means having an another object within another object. Sticking to the car metaphor, we can see the idea of encapsulation in car seats or tires. They (seats or tires) could be of different colors, material and from various manufacturers as long as they meet requirements of a particular car. Combined together, they serve the purpose of a car as whole unit.

From the word 'Poly' meaning 'many', Polymorphism is the ability of an object to be inherited by multiple classes. With polymorphism, it's easier to have consistency in data because child cases are reflecting data that comes from parent classes. Errors and inconsitencies are reduced.

Inheritance is the ability to share attributes with other classes. We do not need to repeat source code to execute a particular task. With inheritance, we can generate other classes that have the same properties and behaviors. For instance, a student and a professor both inherit their properties from the class human. They both have physical attributes and behaviors such as speaking, reading and moving.