Learning Python #2: Object-oriented programming

Past couple of weeks, I’ve been really busy with preparation for A-levels. Over the weekends, I had enough time to spare to read up a bit on object-oriented programming while doing my Python course on Coursera.

Object-oriented programming is a programming language model that revolves around objects rather than actions, and data rather than logic. Conventionally, when we write a program, we are creating a structure that uses logic to receive data, process it and output data. So here, our challenge here is to instead manipulate the objects, rather the logic.

The first step requires us to identify all the objects (name, address, etc) that we want to manipulate. We often do this via data modelling. We then classify the objects into class of objects, which defines the kind of data it contains, and logical sequences that can be manipulated.

Each of this steps has their own pros and allows the user/ programmer to create new data or reuse it. At the same time, we introduces inheritance which is a very important property of Object-oriented programming, that improves data analysis and computing time.. I’ll talk more on this property in future.