Since the issue is to explain to a new programmer and not to a mother or a wife, I would go right straight to the point. OO is about three main concepts:
- Inheritance: a dog is an animal, parent-child, is-a relationship test, etc.
- Encapsulation: public-private (protected), information hiding, internal underlying details are not important to the users of the class, protect users from future changes in the implementation.
- Polymorphism: run-time binding, late binding, method that gets invoked depends on the type of the object and not the reference or pointer to the object.
Also, depending on how much the new programmer has been doing a procedural language, I would need to help him/her unlearn that the functions or procedures are no longer central.
