The theory of Object Oriented Programming vs its application.

Speaking of Object Orientated Programming (OOP), I remember how absurd it was to learn for the first time. In the university, they first teach you a bunch of concepts, ideas and terminologies. After that, you are on your own.

Being a totally newbie in the programming at the time, and a very horrible English speaker in a All English Speaking programming class, I was so proud to be able to use For loops in my C++ class. The same things goes to how proud I was to understand theoretically all the terms that the lecturer explained. I was so proud to get it right about the hierarchy of the daily product family. And the similarity between how your father will left you some fortunes when he died and when a child class inherit a mother class. Theoretically, I was an expert.

When it’s time to apply the theory into practice, everybody was left amazed by why you don’t create a Milk super class and have cheese, butter, and yoghurt extends the Mother Milk just like the Hierarchy diagram explained. You don’t create any classes for them, but instead, you created a class called <<ProgramName>> and store the daily product in the database.

The OOP era ended for me pretty quickly because I was introduced PHP and suddenly I’m happy with my life without thinking much of making the codes look more like what it does in the real world. Carrying the OOP theory in the very deep side of my backpack, I fast forward 5 years, surviving finely. Throughout my working history, I’ve never been in a company that really embrace OOP.

However, things is going to change. The first time ever in the real world I was in a job interview where the people actually care about how much I know about OOP. Digging back into my memory, I managed to answer some of the questions correctly and miss some. I have to be honest with them that I have no experience with OOP at all. But they offered me a job and now I’m happy that I can finally create the Milk class that I didn’t create 5 years ago.

For the moment, OOP is still a very vague concept for me. But I’m looking forward to apply those theories into real practice this time.