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

To a beginner: An object is like a noun. If you're in a classroom then you have desks, students, teacher, projector etc. Each has characterists of their own and some commonalities.

So if we wanted to write a program that would behave in the same way as a classroom, we need to recreate all these 'nouns' in code. Each can do things (student::listen()) and they can interact with each other (student::search(new Desk()))

When we have defined all the rules and behaviours (i.e written our classes/interfaces) then we set them loose in the program. for(i=0;i<30;i++){class.Add(new Student()))} etc