Week 3: The Advantages of Object-Oriented Programming

The first three weeks of CSC148 introduced us to object-oriented programming, which is a style of programming that centres on the creation of objects and classes.  Objects are instances of classes in computer memory; they are defined during program execution so that they can interact with other objects in the program.  Classes are blueprints of objects; they define the attributes of objects and the operations that can be performed on them.  One of the greatest advantages of object-oriented programming is that we can create our own classes.  A reason for why creating classes is so advantageous is code reuse.  If we had to write two programs, one to perform linear algebraic operations on vectors and another to determine the distance between two locations on a map, then we can define a class Point and a class Vector that inherits from class Point.  Class Vector then has the same attributes and methods of class Point.  If we need to overwrite existing methods and write new methods for class Vector, then we can.  Code reuse is important because it saves programmers from the need to rewrite the same code again and again.  Another result of creating our own classes is greater programming clarity.  Every class of objects has a set of methods for that class of objects.  This allows the full extent of operations for every object to become clear to programmers.  This is important because programmers can then have an easier time deciding if they should use an object from class A or an object from class B in their programs.  Therefore, for me, the ability to create our own classes of is one of the greatest strengths of object-oriented programming; it allows for both greater programming clarity and code reuse.

Nevertheless, objected-oriented programming is not easy to pick-up because of my previous programming experiences in CSC108.  The primary focus of CSC108 was procedural programming where we wrote a series of functions to complete tasks; writing classes only received a small focus. My uneasiness with classes became apparent when in our first lab, we wrote a program that counts the number of times a specific word is repeated in a text file.  I asked myself what was the difficulty behind my understanding of classes and I eventually discovered that it was the syntax.  I usually forgot that we needed to use ‘self’ when we were working with class attributes in the body of our methods.  This also happened in defining the parameters of the methods.  I forgot to use (self) there too.  Eventually, I overcame some of my apprehension with classes by gaining a better understanding of the syntax.  Since I only identified my difficulties by asking myself questions, I will continue to ask myself more questions in the course to overcome my future difficulties.