How to program in object-oriented languages

Helping orphans the way you would do it

Programming in object-oriented languagess is more a question of how to design your code than how to write specific procedures.

Traditionally, programming is taught as a bottom-up approach. This model fits very well with procedural programming, even more with non-modular languages, such as Fortran and Basic. Object-oriented concepts, however, should be learned and used in a top-down approach, starting from modeling objects and object interactions.

Although some object-oriented languages follow the object metaphor down to the statement level, like Smalltalk, the most widely known languages of today, i.e. C++, Object Pascal and Java follow an almost procedural notation.

So, to devise a good object-oriented program, one should first devise an effective model and later implement the model in the chosen language.