I read somewhere, that the object oriented programmer thinks more like a novelist than the structured programmer. They tend to think more like historians.
Object oriented design is like writing a novel, or a blog post for that matter. You start of with a few classes, and pretty soon you are building an application that you did not exactly have in mind when you started, its more of a design made out of requirements, a sort of evolved structure. Structured thinking, on the other hand is like writing a historical log, more to do with facts and is based on the fact that you have a clear picture of what you want to write before you actually start writing.
Transition is the hard part they say. If you have been coding in c in a structured fashion since childhood, then especially so. I was reading a book on it the other day, and I liked the comparison. I thought, hey what the heck, lets give it a shot. 10 minutes since I started writing this post, and already a few ideas of object oriented programming are becoming clear in my head. Teaching your brain to think in a way different than what it is used to, is quite tough.
There are ofcourse weird ways to teach yourself things; I mean, who would’ve thought i’d gain an insight on object oriented programming from writing a blog post :)
