6.2. Object-oriented programming

There is a mission to the rest of this chapter: we’re going in search of the emergent complexity I just described. But in order to do this through the medium of code, we first need several new tools. In the next few pages, you’ll learn the basics of object-oriented programming (OOP). If you’re a seasoned programmer, you’re probably already familiar with this concept—very few languages above a certain power and sophistication don’t accommodate object-oriented structures. But even if you’re on familiar ground, please bear with me, because OOP is only half of what I’m trying to illustrate.

If you’ve never heard the term before, OOP is just a small conceptual leap in how you think about coding. Rather than giving the machine the task of dealing with a linear progression of instructions, which is what you’ve done so far, you think in terms of creating objects in memory: self-contained data boxes that you can then use within the familiar linear programming style.