How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Object.

     As far as the concept of Object-Oriented Programming is concerned, I'm in a bit of a pickle relating to a lot of people who have had experience programming in languages other than Python. I had come into this course armed only with what I had learned from CSC 108, in the Winter/Spring semester last year. My knowledge and experience of programming began and ended there, with basic Python, so as far as I knew at the time, OOP was the ONLY way of doing things.
     Object-Oriented Programming deals with the manipulation of, you guessed it, OBJECTS. These objects are very basic data structures, assigned to memory addresses in the system. Different objects are considered to be different instances of classes with their own properties, functional methods, behaviours, and attributes that distinguish themselves from each other such that they can be used and manipulated for whatever intended result. This struck me as a very intuitive way of doing things.
      In Cognitive Science, some of the first things we deal with are the different theories around categorization of concepts. The way that OOP starts from base objects and builds on to them until they have unique methods and attributes is very reminiscent of some classical Greek theories of concepts, in which concepts are based off of a conjunctive list of 'atomic' features that act as building blocks into creating categories of membership based of certain necessary and sufficient essential qualities. This is surprisingly close to defining new classes and the sub classes that are built from them.
    This is useful for computer scientists because in stead of dealing with lists of commands or subroutines, information is being embodied in its own object such that it becomes a lot more similar to the ways which human users are wont to handle and manipulate information and concepts themselves. This not only makes programming a little more intuitive (at least it does for me), but it is very useful in keeping ideas and information very self-contained.

...I think I got a little carried away...