Object-Oriented Programming

Abstract

Designing software which is efficient, meets requirements and is delivered on time is an extremely difficult activity. When hardware engineers design and build a new circuit, they use a set of existing components. They know how each of the components behaves and can express this mathematically, so they can predict with accuracy how the final piece of hardware they have designed will perform. A hardware engineer who refused to use any existing components and insisted on designing everything from the most basic elements would probably produce expensive, terrible designs and would quickly be out of a job. Until recently, however, when software engineers were designing a piece of software they would do exactly this. There are, for example, hundreds of word processor packages; they all do similar things and yet they have all been written from very low-level components. One of the key ideas of object-oriented programming is that reusable components can be used as the building blocks of our applications. We do this by creating classes.