SLOG #1: Inheritance (Object-Oriented Programming)

This is my first SLOG post for my CSC148 course at the University of Toronto. We are required to make weekly posts on topics we learned in class. This week’s topic is Object-Oriented Programing, and I will be talking about inheritance and recursion, possibly two of the most important features of object-oriented programming.

The concepts of inheritance and recursion are something that I’ve been familiar with, ever since high school. I have never really appreciated these two features much as I did until now, which is why I’ve decided to talk about them in this weeks SLOG.

What is inheritance you might ask? For those that don’t know inheritance is when an object or class is based on another object or class, using the same implementation. In other words, inheritance is what allows you to inherit stuff from other objects or classes. Recursion on the other hand is used to define an object in terms of itself.

When looking back at lasts week exercise, E1, it was clear how important these concept are when writing the code for the exercise. The inheritance feature came real handy when completing e1b.py. For the method play in class Dog, we had to inherit the class Toy. Without inheritance feature of object-oriented programming, I would have had to copy and paste the coding making it longer, harder to read, and less efficient. Recursion on the other had was more useful in e1a.py, where we had to take two parameters x and eps, and return the square root of x within an accuracy of eps. Recursion made it easier, since I could use classes within itself. This made my life much easier since I did not have to copy and paste the code over and over again to complete the class.  

Professor Heap made it pretty clear in class that we should try to make our code efficient and as easy to read as possible. Without inheritance and recursion, my coding would be extremely messy and hard to understand. In order for my coding to work, I would have to continually copy and paste code, which would be quite the hassle and would make the code very inefficient. This copy and pasting of code would have also made my code extremely long, which means that it would’ve taken much more time to write the code.

One of the challenges I faced with the E1 was trying to remember everything from CSC108 course, as it’s been more than two years since I took any computer science course. I had to re-familiarize myself with Wingware and re-familiarize myself with computer programming in general. One of the ways I overcame this problem was that I used YouTube to re-familiarize myself with the python basics, such as loops, classes, and the basic built-in functions of python.