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The thing OO tutorials steeped in real world hierarchies are missing, though, is that understanding the concept of a hierarchy is not the hard part. Understandi

• TeMPOraL 7y ago
  And the key part of the problem is understanding that hierarchies and categories are completely arbitrary, and their value is determined by how useful they are. There's no one holy taxonomy. Real-world examples can be used to point that out. Whales are mammals to biologists, but they're essentially fish to the economy. A bat is a mammal and an airplane is a vehicle, but both of them go into the same bag as birds if your main concern is "things that can fly" vs. "things that can't". Square is a special form of rectangle to mathematicians, but it's the other way around if your main concern is how much information you need to draw it. "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." Etc. Once you crack the student's belief in there being one proper taxonomy for everything (a belief that strangely seems common even in adults in general population), you can then effectively show them that one of the main tasks of a programmer is finding the most useful way of categorizing things they're dealing with - and once that's done, the programming languages tend to have tools that let the programmer exploit such categorizations to minimize complexity.