My Object Oriented Programming Journey
My Object Oriented Programming Journey
- Subject: My Object Oriented Programming Journey
- From: Alesh Slovak <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2001 12:33:13 -0400
This is a retelling of my journey of programming and how "the revelation"
of object oriented programming hit me. For the benefit of those who are
trying to make the jump to the next level.
I was quite young when I started programming... 12 or 13 I think. The
first thing I thought of when my Dad bought me the "Programming Starter Kit
for Macintosh" was "cool, now I can make an awesome 3D video game for the
Mac!". Oh boy, was I in for a surprise! I opened the book and was so daunted
that I didn't open it for another year! I actually played around with
AppleScript and after making a few little scripts and gaining understanding
of simple programming basics I opened the C book again and found it quite
easy to understand.
Later I started hearing more and more about this thing called object
oriented programming and C++... it baffled me. At this time I was in high
school and unfortunately we had PCs and so we learned Visual Basic. In my
ignorance I thought Visual Basic WAS object oriented (although it could be
considered object oriented to an extent, it really is not, at least not what
is generally considered to be object oriented). I hated Visual Basic... and
I associated object oriented programming with it. I went around for a few
years claiming object oriented programming sucked not really knowing what it
was or its true power.
In my senior year at high school I was offered the unique opportunity to
enroll at the University of Waterloo for part time studies as well as work
at a co-op placement all while finishing high school. I took one University
course... CS 130: An Introduction to Object Oriented Programming in Java. It
took me one or two lessons from this course to understand the concept of
object oriented programming. It just hit me like thunder (it was like a
revelation and probably as close as I'll ever get to Nirvana)... something
snapped and it occurred to me that I had been wasting precious time with
procedural programming and I blamed Microsoft, Visual Basic and my high
school (probably not the right place to put the blame) for sending me so far
off course. I quickly turned around and became so enthralled with this new
way of thinking it was so cool and so incredibly useful. I also learned it
quickly because at my placement I was now working with C++ and Java applying
the very things I had learned right away.
This is what I would recommend to anyone learning object oriented
programming or trying to get past the hurdle of the big "brain block" first
of all you MUST be exposed to procedural programming something like C or
BASIC. Start simple. After learning the basics apply those skills, think
creative and make some simple demo programs, that's what I did and I had a
lot of fun doing it too. I would highly recommend taking an object oriented
programming course at university or college. It is really helpful to have
someone just talk to you about object oriented programming over and over
hammering down the wall that has been built up over the years until finally
it crumbles. A book isn't quite as forceful. You have to apply your new
found skills as fast as possible, the best way to learn is to experiment.
Java is actually a pretty good place to start it is like a simplified
version of C++ you don't have to be worried about pointers and deallocating
memory and such things.
Anyway I hope this helped somebody... sorry for making this so long, but
I think I got my point across... now I just have to learn Objective-C,
Cocoa, OpenGL, Voodoo, the Mambo.....
Alesh