3 ms·

I'm a beginner and Python is the only language I'm familiar with

• abecedarius 3y ago
  OK. It might help to keep in mind a couple things: - Python started as a simple language, but it's grown over the decades, and professional programmers learned the new complications along the way. They don't naturally appreciate what it's like if you get hit with them all together, as sometimes happens -- it all seems simple to them. So to understand OO I would try to screen out the fancier bits like the class variables you mentioned -- you can come back to them later. - The original central idea of objects (from Smalltalk) is, an object is a thing that can receive different commands ('methods' in Python), and update its own variables and call on other objects. The way Python gives you to define objects (by defining a class and then creating an instance of the class) is not the most direct possible way it could've been designed to do this -- if it feels more complicated than necessary, it kind of is. But it's not too bad, you can get used to how it works for the most central stuff as I mentioned, and learn more from there.