What's the best way to define the words “class” and “object” to someone who hasn't used them?

Question

My neighbor is taking \"Intro to Java\", and asked me to help explain a few of the first-day concepts. I realized that since I do this everyday, I don\'t have the beginner\

Answer 1

Your question details have pretty good definitions of all the terms. Here's an analogy I found pretty useful - I've listed it in a kind of top-down approach:

class Employee. This is a kind of, as you say, 'blueprint' or 'template' that contains generic details about all kinds of employees in an organization - let's consider the director, a project manager, a developer, a contractor, or a member of the housekeeping staff. They're all employees : hence, they're all instances of the class, or objects.

All the objects have certain attributes in common - they're all allotted, say, an employee ID. They all draw a salary. They all have a designation. One could call these the member variables, as they exist for all objects, but their values are clearly different based on what object they're members of.

And finally, there are some functions that need to be performed for all employees - say onBoarding() or calculateSalary().