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.

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Answer 1

One of the things I find many people get confused about in OOP are actual instances of an object. That you have the ability to create multiple instances of the same class, independent of one another, seems to blow peoples' minds. If you're going to go with the usual "physical object" analogy, make sure you talk about how you can have multiple instances of said objects and how they can interact with one another as well as with themselves.

For example, take the classic "car" example. Now you have your driver program "road" which has a "carCrash(Car car1, Car car2)" function. Explain how the objects interact with one another.

The only problem with analogies like this are that, in my experience anyway, they tend to break down when you start talking about static variables/functions. I guess what I'm trying to say is that no analogy is perfect, so try not to rely on them too much.