The Definitions of “Object-Oriented Programming”

The objective of this post is to form a parenthetical definition, a sentence definition, and an expanded definition of a relatively complex term. The objectives are as follows:

1. Appreciate the importance and role of definitions in technical writing
2. Understand how audience and purpose indicate the need for definition
3. Differentiate between the levels of details in the definition
4. Select the right level of detail according to the situation

The term, object-oriented programming (OOP), is a term used in computer science and is commonly used by programmers to describe a computer programming model to other programmers. Object-oriented programming is used to represent the computer language of 0s and 1s in a format that humans can understand using objects to better understand and write code.

Parenthetical Definition

When starting the next big project, my manager suggested that we should use a programming language that supports object-oriented programming (a programming model that is built based on real-life objects) instead of a programming language that does not have this abstraction for easier understanding.

Sentence Definition

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a computer programming model that organizes software design around data, or objects, rather than functions and logic.

Expanding Definition

FIGURE 1 Class of cars and three objects of the cars.

Source: What is Object Oriented Programming?: IST Advanced Topics Primer. (n.d.). Retrieved January 30, 2022, from https://webcourses.ucf.edu/courses/1249560/pages/what-is-object-oriented-programming

A class car can have multiple objects of cars and the class car acts as a blueprint for car objects. In this example, there are three car objects (polo, mini, beetle) that follow the blueprint of the class car.

Source: Singh, D. (2020, December 30). Object Oriented Programming (OOPS) tutorial with examples. HolyCoders. Retrieved January 30, 2022, from https://holycoders.com/object-oriented-programming-oops-tutorial-with-examples/

 

An object contains attributes and methods. Attributes represent the state of the object and methods define the behaviour of the object. In this example, we create an object of class Human with three attributes (name, age, email) and two methods (walk, sendEmail).

 

There are four main structures of object-oriented programming:

1. Classes: User-defined data types that act as the blueprint for individual objects, attributes and methods.
2. Objects: Instances of a class created with specifically defined data. Objects can correspond to real-world objects (e.g. cars, people, dogs, courses) or abstract entities (e.g. parser, node, array, set).
3. Methods: Functions that are defined inside a class that describe the behaviours of an object.
4. Attributes: Represent the state of an object.