OOPs

Okay, those of you who came here looking for crochet stuff today: Sorry! All nerdy programming stuff instead.

I've been slowly making my way through a couple of teach-yourself C++ books, trying to learn the language. I haven't done any serious programming for almost twenty years, and I'm finding that my programming muscles are a bit rusty. But it's coming back, slowly but surely.

Object-oriented programming (OOP) was just being invented when I graduated from college — or rather, it was just entering the mainstream at that time. In any case, they weren't teaching it at most universities yet. I learned BASIC, Fortran, and COBOL, then I learned top-down structured programming, using Pascal and C. I really liked the top-down structured approach. It just clicked with how my brain seemed to work.

I worked as a C programmer for a while after graduation, then eventually dropped out of the workforce to be a stay-at-home mom. Around the time I was having Brigid, OOP was really taking off, but I never had the opportunity to learn it.

So now, in learning C++, I'm making all sorts of baby programs, simple things like converting degrees from Fahrenheit to Celsius, and finding areas of rectangles, and printing cute grids of X's. Playing around with recursions and iterations, if...else statements, for loops, do...while loops, and so on. Simple stuff, but still fun to do.

I still haven't gotten to the OOP part yet though, and I must admit I'm a bit apprehensive about this part. Will I be able to break out of the top-down structured programming mold and embrace objects and polymorphism and encapsulation and inheritance? Oh, well, no matter. I'm having fun trying, and that's the important part right now.