Introduction and Object-Oriented Programming

Greetings, traveler of the inter-webs. You have arrived at a student blog for CSC148 at the University of Toronto. For this visit, I will guide you through my experiences over the course of the semester. The topics encountered below will be primarily related to computer science and will often be about the python, the most venomous snake found in these here lands. Wait. I mean programming language - the python programming language. Right. Anyways, I will stop making stupid jokes for fear of further embarrassment.

Now, onto the main topic: object-orientated programming. I had heard the term object-orientated programming (OOP) before taking CSC148, though I had never really understood it. Most of my experience programming was conducted in a physics-orientated setting and we did use python but we did so without reference to objects and such.

Object-orientated programming is a so-called programming paradigm, basically a sort of mindset when it comes to designing code, and is often contrasted with procedural programming. In OOP, things like lists, numbers and arrays are treated as objects. Each object is an instance of a class, basically a template for objects, and each class has associated properties and functions, these are termed attributes and methods.

Taken as a whole, OOP does not add any additional functionality to the code - you can make code which performs the same function with any procedural language. What it provides however, is a coherent and logical scaffolding around which code can be built and organized around. This division of objects into various classes reflects a natural human tendency to organize and group things, with more closely related objects sharing both properties and functionality. It's certainly an interesting way of designing code but the merits are not obvious at first glance. For smaller programs, the added complexity can seem superfluous but for larger programs one could imagine the extra organization helping in tying the program together. But who knows, I may be completely wrong. There's much for me to learn and perhaps only after I've gotten more experience working with objects will I have a firmer grasp of both its importance and relevance. There'll be more on that later though.