[Sussex] Simple OOP tutorial

[Geoff Teale]

Just a quick reaction to Nicks post (which was quite interesting).

Events have absolutely nothing to do with object orientism.  Event
 driven programming is a nice abstraction of ugly loops required in
 interactive systems.  Because people like the event model they have
 been added into API's that are not human facing as well (gtk and Qt
 both do this).  This is part of the danger of modern business
 orientated languages like VB and Java - they come ready loaded with a
 number of concepts, educational guides, courses and tools that blur a
 lot of concepts in order to "get the job done".  From a practical
 point of view that is somewhat acceptable and indeed a "selling
 point", but it doesn't really encourage an understanding of the
 approaches involved and unfortunately produces some bad programmers
 with non-trasnferable skills.

Of course I am viewing this from the point of view of a professional
programmer who has a great deal of difficulty finding skilled
engineers.  Hobbiests see programming in a very different way (I know I
used to be one) - but the need for a common language of concepts is
vital in any situation where developers communicate.  Moreover the
ability to see capabilities of concepts beyond the confines of a
single, familiar programming language is essential if we are to do the
job well.

One advantage that PHP seems to have over the VB approach is that it
seems to support something more that VB's primitive interface
inheritance, though encapsulation is somewhat lacking (VB's support for
encapsulation was actually OK).

One thing I have always disliked about PHP is the terseness of it's
syntax for a language that really is very simple. That's a matter of
taste of course.  

-- 
Geoff Teale