bentrask.com > Notes & Essays >

Object Oriented

April 2011

What Object Oriented Isn’t:

• Overriding
• Subclassing
• Classes
• Prototypes
• Inheritance
• Types
• Overloading
• Static dispatch
• Virtual functions
• Dynamic dispatch
• Messaging
• Polymorphism
• Factories
• Singletons
• Interfaces
• Information hiding
• A silver bullet

What Object Oriented Is:

• State with behavior
• A natural way of looking at the world
• Fundamentally equivalent to lexically scoped closures (behavior with state)

What Object Oriented Means:

Give the different pieces of data (objects) control of tasks that act on them (methods).

What Object Oriented Implies:

1. The data that your application acts on should be divided into a wide array of distinct groups based on concrete, logical distinctions.
2. The different groups of data should be given meaningful noun-form titles.
3. The tasks that your application performs should be naturally categorized based on the group of data on which they operate.
4. The different tasks should be given meaningful command-form titles.

What Object Oriented Produces:

Code with a fundamental unified style for all of its most basic parts. Terrible code translated into object oriented style will at least gain structure; great code will remain great (as long as higher-level constructs are preserved).

Remember:

Any program can be rewritten in an infinite number of functionally equivalent ways. As the programmer, your job is to find the way that best conveys the code’s meaning.