Ok, confession time, I don’t really get object orientation. So in an effort to increase my understanding, I’m going to write some overview and discussion in an effort to understand things a bit better. Hopefully some of you will find this helpful. I’ve tinkered with programing for a long time. I read a huge chunk of a popular Python introductory text, and I’ve read a chunk of Practical Common Lisp, but people start talking about objects and I loose track of everything. I think there’s something slightly unconventional--at least initially--about object orientation.

We understand procedural programming pretty easily. There’s a set of steps that you need to perform, and you tell the computer what they are, and then data gets handed off to the program, it runs, and the steps are performed at the end. Or, conversely, someone calls your program and says “I want data” (perhaps implicitly) and the program says “ok, to go get data, I need to do these things,” and then it runs and at the end you see data.

Object orientation turns this sort of sideways and says “lets build a representation of our data (objects) then write code that says what happens to those objects.” Ok, that almost makes sense, data happens to your program and you write code to provide behaviors and responses to all of the things that will happen when your program runs. So you feed objects (data) into your program it does its thing in response to those objects and different data (probably) exists on the other end.

I hope I haven’t lied yet! To continue…

The thing that always confused me, given my utter lack of background is this whole “methods,” and “classes,” thing that programmer types launch into almost immediately. To overview:

Objects as I said above, are just another way to think about data. It’s a “thing,” that the program has to deal with. Classes really just represent the structure of a program. We hear “objects are instances of classes,” but this feels sort of backwards, it feels more intuitive to say that classes provide a framework for interacting with objects: they describe the loose “shape” of their objects and then create a place for behaviors to exist. Methods, then, are those behaviors. Often methods “belong” to classes (either literally in the structure of the code, or just conceptually) and they define what happens to objects as the program runs.

Thus the role of an object oriented runtime (or compiler? I think that’s the right word for the program that executes the program,) is to take data that comes in, figure out what class (or classes) the object “fits into,” and then apply the methods that belong to that class.

Whew! So, how’d I do?

Assuming my understanding is correct, allow to offer the following analysis:

  • By using multiple methods, in given sequence you can reuse code within a class, rather than needing to define and redefine a set of increasingly complex procedures.

  • At the same time there’s a much higher start up cost for object oriented code. Because we think about getting things done in programs we--or I--tend to think in terms of procedures, rather than objects, it takes a bit of extra brainpower to do the object oriented way. And for most tasks--which are pretty small--creating classes and creating methods seems like a lot of stuff to have to hold in your head when you’re figuring out what needs to done?

    It sort of seems like, in order to do object orientation right, you have to already know what has to happen in the program. Otherwise, classes fail to properly describe the data/methods that you need.

  • Ok, so now that I, more or less, understand what’s going on here, might we be better off calling it class-oriented programming? Or “class-centered” programming?

Thoughts?