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This is a good point. Because you can't make a car or an animal out of software these analogies always seem to lead to bad teaching. Much better to use somethi

This is a good point. Because you can't make a car or an animal out of software these analogies always seem to lead to bad teaching. Much better to use something like Person and Employee/Student, where it's easy to immediately grasp the value based on not having to duplicate the data fields you'd need for a basic CRM. (As opposed to having to make up ridiculous methods about the panda eating bamboo or whatever where no one understands what the fuck is going on.)

grahamburger 11y ago
Exactly! Ugh I hate that. "A cat can be an instance of animal, but it needs a 'meow' function" ... What?
- stephengillie 11y ago
  By oversimplifying, these examples actually obscure the lesson. It helped me to think of OOP objects as sub-variables, or even as a set of variables grouped by the first part of their name. Like a "multi-key/multi-value" hash table. The purpose of functions only started making sense after learning calculus and the replacement method, where a complex term was replaced by a single variable. This is where I learned they're mostly for readability, an adaptation to make programming easier for humans to do.
- BatFastard 11y ago
  Adding a "meow" function is the wrong way to go about it. The base class just needs a protected sound function so that each derived class can set the sound in its initialization routine. So many programmers, so few who truly understand OOP.
  - deleted 11y ago
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