Muses et essais

Today, someone I knew wasn’t technical at all asked me this question… obviously, they were talking about Object Oriented Development / Programming / Design, and that’s how I replied:

Object Oriented reasoning is to be opposed to procedural or machine related reasonings.

Instead of having to know exactly how machines work intrinsically (assembly code) or having to manage loads of loosely related code (procedural approach), the Object Oriented approach allows developers (or designers) to think in terms of real-world entities (objects) to build applications and thus architecture all body of work around common representations of those entities.

In other words, in the past 20 years we have significantly raised the level of abstraction of computer systems from processor-specific code to generic abstracted code. Objects contain their own data (a PERSON has a NAME), have their own behaviour (a PERSON can WALK), protect their inner workings (let’s say they’re shy) inherit qualities from parent objects (yes, objects have parents too) and can interact with other objects (a PERSON can DRIVE a CAR while TALKing on the PHONE)…

The benefits of this approach are multiple: you enable the reuse of components, you improve the general quality of the code, you can focus on businessy more than technical issues and you can even port your application from a system to another (think Java!)… those among many other advantages.

…even Cobol has gone Object Oriented!!!

What would be your explanation?