I think a simple example from GUI programming would do much better. How about window classes?
It's funny, because OOP came my sphere of awareness around the same time that desktop software was beginning to use it for extensible GUIs. I'm talking about Turbo Pascal's Turbo Vision, and whatever Turbo C++ had.
That actually slowed down my comprehension of OOP. I thought OOP was for GUI work. OOP added so much complexity to the GUI code, and the GUI code added so much complexity to the OOP concepts, that it actually set me back by quite a bit! :-)
Mind you, it didn't help that, just as I was grasping crucial OOP concepts (e.g. a pointer to base class can point to an instance of child class), my instructor told me that was wrong and that I didn't understand OOP...
Actually, you're right. I started with OOP around the same time (sounds like), and I remember having trouble grasping the benefits of OOP then because, like you say, it was much more complex all the way 'round. I was used to just calling functions which would return a struct and then passing that struct to other functions, which was straightforward and easy to keep track of.
> ...my instructor told me that was wrong and that I didn't understand OOP...
Ugh.
I wonder how it should be taught then? Looking at the comments in this thread, it looks like a lot of people are simply choosing to use it in ways that make sense to them. Is there a universally-agreed-upon use case for OOP? If not, is there anything wrong with just teaching it as one of many tools, and letting students sort it out on their own?
I've tutored a few kids on programming. OOP has been my least favorite part every time. I honestly have no idea how to approach it as an occasional instructor.
It's funny, because OOP came my sphere of awareness around the same time that desktop software was beginning to use it for extensible GUIs. I'm talking about Turbo Pascal's Turbo Vision, and whatever Turbo C++ had.
That actually slowed down my comprehension of OOP. I thought OOP was for GUI work. OOP added so much complexity to the GUI code, and the GUI code added so much complexity to the OOP concepts, that it actually set me back by quite a bit! :-)
Mind you, it didn't help that, just as I was grasping crucial OOP concepts (e.g. a pointer to base class can point to an instance of child class), my instructor told me that was wrong and that I didn't understand OOP...