this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Programming
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Not OP, but also interested in wrapping my head around OOP and I still struggle with this in a few different respects. If what I'm writing isn't a full program, but more like a few functions to process data, is there still a use case for writing it in an OOP style? Say I'm doing what you describe, operating on the same data with different functions, if written properly couldn't a program do this even without a class structure to it? 🤔
Perhaps it's inelegant and terrible in the long term, but if it serves a brief purpose, is it more in the case of long term use that it reveals its greater utility?
I use classes to group data together. E.g.
This is much nicer to handle than three different lists of temperature, voltage and current. And then a fourth list of resistances. And another list for
another_parameter
. Especially if you have more parameters to each measurement and need to group measurements by these parameters.Yeah thats kinda where the first object oriented programming came from. In C (which doesn’t have classes) you define a struct (an arrangement of data in memory, kinda like a named tuple in Python), and then you write functions to manipulate those structs.
For example, multiplying two complex vectors might look like:
Programmers decided it would be a lot more readable if you could write code that looked like:
Or even just;
(This last iteration is an example of “operator overloading”).
So yes, you can work entirely without classes, and that’s kinda how classes work under the hood. Fundamentally object oriented programming is just an organizational tool to help you write more readable and more concise code.
Thanks for elaborating! I'm pretty sure I've written some variations of the first form you mention in my learning projects, or broken them up in some other ways to ease myself into it, which is why I was asking as I did.