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

Sometimes it is hard for beginners to understand how objects relate to program execution. ("Ok, I have a Person object I can instantiate as 'Jerry', but where do I perform the instantiation? What creates Jerry? Ok, then what creates that? Where does it all start?")

Try a universe analogy. The types in your program represent, at various levels of abstraction, all the possible objects that can exist in the universe. Make sure to show them the big bang (program entry point)! This will also show them why global variables in OOP don't make sense. Then you can dive right into OOP principles.