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Why Is Understanding Objects So Critical to Being a Successful OO Programmer?

Time and again, we meet software developers—at our places of employment, at clients' offices, at professional conferences, on college campuses—who have attempted to master an OO programming language like C# by taking a course in C#, reading a book about C#, or installing and using a C# integrated development environment (IDE) such as Visual Studio .NET. However, there is something fundamentally missing: a basic understanding of what objects are all about, and more importantly, knowledge of how to structure a software application from the ground up to make the most of objects.

Imagine that you've been asked to build a house, and that you know the basics of home construction. In fact, you're a world-renowned home builder whose services are in high demand! Your client tells you that all of the materials you'll need for building this home are going to be delivered to you. On the day construction is to begin, a truck pulls up at the building site and unloads a large pile of strange, blue, star-shaped blocks with holes in the middle. You're totally baffled! You've built countless homes using materials like lumber, brick, and stone, and know how to approach a building project using these familiar materials; but you haven't got a clue about how to assemble a house using blue stars.

Scratching your head, you pull out a hammer and some nails and try to nail the blue stars together as if you were working with lumber, but the stars don't fit together very well. You then try to fill in the gaps with the same mortar that you would use to adhere bricks to one another, but the mortar doesn't stick to these blue stars very well. Because you're working under tight cost and schedule constraints for building this home for your client, however (and because you're too embarrassed to admit that you, as an "expert" builder, don't know how to work with these modern materials), you press on. Eventually, you wind up with something that looks (on the outside, at least) like a house.

Your client comes to inspect the work, and is terribly disappointed. One of the reasons he had selected blue stars as a construction material was that they are extremely energy efficient; but, because you have used nails and mortar to assemble the stars, they have lost a great deal of their inherent ability to insulate the home. To compensate, your client asks you to replace all of the windows in the home with thermal glass windows so that they will allow less heat to escape. You're panicking at this point! Swapping out the windows will take as long, if not longer, than it has taken to build the house in the first place, not to mention the cost of replacing stars that will be damaged in the renovation process. When you tell your customer this, he goes ballistic! Another reason that he selected blue stars as the construction material was because of their recognized flexibility and ease of accommodating design changes; but, because of the ineffective way in which you assembled these stars, you're going to have to literally rip them apart and replace a great many of them.

This is, sad to say, the way many programmers wind up building an OO application when they don't have appropriate training in how to approach the project from the perspective of objects. Worse yet, the vast majority of would-be OO programmers are blissfully ignorant of the need to understand objects in order to program in an OO language. So, they take off programming with a language like C# and wind up with a far from ideal result: a program that lacks flexibility when an inevitable "mid-course correction" occurs in terms of a change in the requirements specification, as when new functionality needs to be introduced after an application has been deployed.


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