Last term in CSC108,
I believed objected-oriented programming to be the most useless, tedious and
annoying part of the course. I did not understand the purpose of classes, as
they seemed to be a much more complex and inconvenient way of creating functions.
While I acknowledge that I do not have a thorough understanding of
object-oriented programming, I believe I have made strides in understanding its
purpose. An instance of a class has specific data and attributes that are
unique to that class. These features assist greatly in keeping everything
organized. For example, I would imagine that Facebook performs well because of
its usage of classes. A profile, for example, could possibly be a class that
Facebook uses to create profiles for people that sign up for it. It would have
attributes such as number of friends, age and date of birth and methods such as
adding another user as a friend. I could not imagine how this would be
accomplished without the usage of classes since the code would be much more complex
and disorganized. This example is just to show that I have a new perspective on
classes and their usefulness. I find it interesting that classes can inherit
properties of other classes, although I do not understand the purpose of this
since we could just have one class with all the properties of similar classes.
With all the great benefits of classes, I still do believe that they are
somewhat complex to develop at times. For example, I find that having to create
__str__ and __eq__ methods very inconvenient and somewhat time consuming. I am
also moderately uncomfortable with implementing such methods because I do not
understand how they work. For example, I don't quite understand why using the
== operator on two instances of a class will check if their memory addresses
are equal rather than their values. This is one of the several aspects of
classes that I have trouble comprehending.
I believe I can solve my troubles
with object-oriented programming by consistent practice with developing them,
and by analyzing its properties thoroughly from top to bottom so that I will
understand why they work the way they do. I believe that this solution is working so far because I have a thorough understanding of how some of the features in object-oriented programming works. For example, I know that the __init__ method is used to give an instance of a class its specific attributes and data, depending on the class of course. This was an example of a concept that I was struggling with before but now I am very comfortable with. I suspect that the reasons for my
problems with object oriented programming are because I started working with
them before really understanding why and how they work. With this post, I hope
to have conveyed my thoughts on object-oriented programming rather than
reiterating its several features.
