Chris Carlen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > From what I've read of OOP, I don't get it. I have also found some > articles profoundly critical of OOP. I tend to relate to these articles.
OOP can be abused (particularly with deep or intricate inheritance structures). But the base concept is simple and clear: you can bundle state and behavior into a stateful "black box" (of which you may make as many instances, with independent state but equal behavior, as you need). > Hence, being a hardware designer rather than a computer scientist, I am > conditioned to think like a machine. I think this is the main reason > why OOP has always repelled me. I'm an MS in EE (minoring in computer engineering) by training (over a quarter century ago:-); I "slid" into programming kind of inexhorably (fate obviously wanted me to:-) but paradigms such as OOP (and functional programming, but that's another subject) always made sense to me *in direct analogy to my main discipline*. A JK flip-flop and a D flip-flop are objects with 1-bit states and different behavior; I may put in my circuit as many (e.g.) J-K flip-flops as I need, and each will have separate state, even though each will have identical behavior (how it responds to signals on the J and K lines). I don't need to think about how a J-K flip-flop is *made*, inside; I use it as a basic component in designing richer circuits (well, I did back when I DID design circuits, but I haven't _totally_ forgotten:-). I do know how to make one in terms of transistors, should I ever need to (well, maybe I'd have to look it up, but I _used_ to know:-), but such a need is unlikely to arise, because it's likely to be there as a basic component in whatever design library I'm supposed to use for this IC. Components much richer than J-K flip-flops are obviously more common nowadays, but remember my real-world experience designing chips is from the early '80s;-). Nevertheless the concept of a "bundle of state and behavior" is still there -- and a direct, immediate analogy to OOP. (Functional programming, OTOH, is analogous to stateless input-output transformation circuits, an even more basic concept in HW design:-). If anything, it's the concept of "procedural programming" that has no direct equivalent in HW design (unless you consider microcode "HW", and, personally, I don't;-). [[Fortunately as a part of the CE minor I did learn Fortran, Lisp and Pascal, and a few machine-languages too, so I wasn't totally blown away when I found myself earning a living by programming rather than by designing chips, but that's another story:-)]] Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
