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Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

On a similar note, I tried learning OOP every year for 10 years, never stuck. Everything always felt like functions at its core, didn't matter the language.

Then one day I had a problem where we got a lot of value out of a class. At this point I was a professional programmer, I had already made plenty of websites and apps.

When I teach people programming, I basically make this simplification so people can get programming cool stuff immediately. Of course I explain there is OOP, but we don't waste time on it. You don't need to understand it to make a text based video game.

EDIT: I started programming when I was 17, I didn't start a programming career until I was 30. I only dabbled as a hobby.

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> 10 years

Wow thats usually the amount of time it would take to become an expert in a completely new field.

That is basically my story.

Started learning programming in high school. Went to college for engineering. Worked in (real) engineering for 8 years.

Now I automate engineering jobs.

Yeah, honestly, I'm finding that comment a little hard to believe or even remotely understand…

I was in tech for several years (although not always programming) and it took me an embarrassing long time to grok the "why" of OOP. I read the vehicle/car/truck and animal/cat/dog/makeSound kind of examples many times in school but it never clicked why this approach would be useful. It's only when you start working with other people and dealing with stuff you can't keep all in your head when you get the "why" of OOP.

My one liner for what oop is: Objects are groupings of data (constituting a new data type, in a typed language) with specialized functions that only work on them.

I know you know, but it even took me a long time to get the utility.

Lets see, what I would describe it as:

You would use classes if you have a category of something with similar attributes that you would want to do various manipulations on and get various outputs.

My next sentence was going to be an example about a car and calculating the number of seats. Its a shame how quickly I need to move to a real world example, but when talking to a programming noob, I feel bad for saying the word attribute/class/method.

I feel less bad about functions, they should know this stuff from 8th grade.

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