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OOP Basics


For this week’s blog on software design, I chose to watch a video presented by Dr. Steve Bagley on some fundamentals of object oriented programming (OOP). I’m embarrassed to say that although I am taking several upper-level computer science classes, I am unsure I would be able to give a good definition of what object oriented design was. To be fair though, it has been several years since I have taken CS 101, and it seemed like such a foreign concept at the time.

I felt silly learning about something so elementary again, but it made a lot more sense when I’ve had as much exposure to OOP as I have now. For the video, he uses a game of “Pong” as an example of how OOP might use objects to represent the “ball” and “paddles.” From there, he talked some about inheritance and touched on a few more topics, albeit briefly.

The main reason why I didn’t understand the benefit of this way of programming is that I didn’t know how else you would do it. I didn’t realize that without declaring objects, how difficult it would be to keep track of everything and make everything work properly. 

This video was made for someone who might be interested in computers, but this is not their specialty. Although this was helpful for me in getting a better background on what OOP is, I felt it did not go far enough. I would have liked it if it went a step further and explained some of the next topics that would logically follow. The video was under fifteen minutes, and most of the videos in the channel are that length, so there wasn’t that much room to expand. 

He said that he would go over the topics like inheritance in another video, but I searched through all the videos with him, but I could not find the “OOP part two” or anything of that nature. I don’t like that the channel doesn’t cater to people with a computer science background, but on the other hand, there are some interesting looking videos that I would like to watch after this. My next step will be to learn about functional programming because I do not have any experience in that area.
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