C++ Was a Joke

[Thomas Klemm]

(03-04-2014 09:42 PM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  I've read various descriptions for what the parts of OOP are, watched YouTube videos on OOP, and none of it has ever really made any sense to me, at least as presented.

About 30 years ago I attended a lecture of Niklaus Wirth based on his book: Algorithms and Data Structures. It showed me how both are inherently related. If the data can be structured well to a given problem the program is usually much simpler.
OOP combines both: an object is data together with processes. Years later I realized that a closure is a dual concept: a function with related data. Thus both are similar: just looking from a different angle.
We don't have much structure in FOCAL programs: no proper names for variables, no types, at least some kind of array, just GTO and XEQ. Thus programs for difficult problems tend to become hard to write and read. This is very similar to assembler programming.
Analogies for OOP from the real world (e.g. animals, cars, ...) didn't help me to understand the concept. Geometric shapes were even a bad example as they violated the Liskov substitution principle. But it was easy once I knew what's going on under the hood.

Cheers
Thomas