Why Object Oriented Programming Makes Sense?

By: Hermawih Hasan

A boy was sitting there for about an hour trying to memorize a school task which has exactly one long sentence, ninety five words, or five hundreds and twenty three letters. The boy who was on the third grade in a primary school could not stand it anymore. It was obvious that the boy could not handle it. Out of desperation, he was crying so loud that his father finally decided to help him.

His father took him to another room and tried to calm him down. After the boy stopped crying, his father drew eight symbols and mapped for each symbols to some words on that sentence. It was like magic, the boy could memorize that sentence in just about ten minutes.

I do not have any scientific explanation of how our brain work but I knew that our brains need something to associate one thing with other things; the exact word probably is encapsulation. I will give definition of "encapsulate" from Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary: "to express the most important parts of something in a few words, a small space or a single object."

If you have noticed, I also deliberately wrote the amount of letters of those words. Suppose that you must memorize that entire letters by combining all the words into only one word, could somebody be able to memorize that word? It is difficult thing to do. But by separating 523 letters into 95 words that have meanings, the task seems easier to do. By logically mapping 95 words into only 8 symbols, the task is surely a lot easier. You see that the word encapsulation can be applied not only to object oriented programming (OOP) but also to memorizing, learning, or studying.

For experimentation, could you spell this word, iamgoingtobedearlybecauseimustgetupearlyinthemorning? Now try to break up that word into some words: I am going to bed early because I must get up early in the morning.

After the incident, one day an idea come to me of how the above story related to OOP. Why OOP makes sense? With the help of only eight symbols, the boy could memorize ninety five words. So it was about one symbol representing twelve words. In OOP, object has methods, properties, and events. If I asked a nine years boy: what a bicycle does or what properties a bicycle has, I think the boy could answer it correctly. One word of bicycle could encapsulate many things of what a bicycle does and many things of what its properties.

Several years ago, I read a book about "Extreme Programming". After reading the book I was not convinced of that methodology. However after reading a book from Dr. David West, Object Thinking, Microsoft Press, and then I think "Extreme Programming" practices can also be applied to a software development. What made me change my point of view? Dr. West said in his book on Page 28:

"Object thinking is central to extreme thinking. This is true even though there is little explicit mention of objects in the XP books. Object thinking is so basic to XP that it is simply assumed."

By the way, the above story of a boy is a true story because the boy is my son who is now on the fourth grade of a primary school.