How to explain an object?

Question

It\'s been years since I thought of this, but I am training some real juniors soon and need to explain what an object is to someone who doesn\'t know what it is.

B

Answer 1

Back when I was learning OOP, I was puzzled by all these "car / animal / whatever" metaphors. They didn't help me at all. Then someone said that a class/object is just a set of variables (class members) and functions to deal with them (methods) - which is actually true. It was that simple!

Using all these popular metaphors is just misleading people, IMHO. Cars don't have that much in common with OOP. It's easy to understand these metaphors when you already know what they mean, but trying to begin with them... no.