Comment by jonstewart
1 day ago
I was just musing to a young team member the other day that I think OOP comes easy to me because I learned HyperCard (v1.2 on System 6 on an SE) at a young age. RIP.
1 day ago
I was just musing to a young team member the other day that I think OOP comes easy to me because I learned HyperCard (v1.2 on System 6 on an SE) at a young age. RIP.
This was my experience too. My mom had a subscription to Byte Magazine, and I remember trying to read the articles on OOP when they came out. It was utterly opaque to me. When I started using HyperCard, the light bulb turned on.
I think a subtle factor is that when learning HC (or Visual Basic, or LabVIEW), you started using objects before you learned how to create them. All of these packages came with lots of pre-written objects that were easy to use. In the case of VB, you had to buy a special version if you wanted to create your own objects, and very few people did.
I think when teaching newer languages like Python, this is done as a matter of course. For instance if you show someone how to calculate a function and graph it, you're probably using objects from something like Matplotlib, before being shown how to create your own. And once again, among casual programmers, relatively few people define their own classes.
>And once again, among casual programmers, relatively few people define their own classes.
I find that I'm less interested in defining my own classes today than I was 10 or so years ago. https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/presentation/352/ left a big impression on me (though I didn't see it until a fair bit after the fact).