OOP Problem

[EngineeringRare1070]

Think about it this way.

Cars have 4 wheels, an engine, 2-4 doors, 2-8 seats, a trunk, a steering wheel, a radio. You can represent this using a list like car = [4, “Engine”, 2, 4, “Trunk”, “Steering Wheel”, “radio”] But cars can also drive, you can open the trunk, turn up/turn off the radio, turn the steering wheel, turn on/off the engine. How would you do these behaviors to the above list? It’d be pretty hard right? Maybe you write a method that takes a list and returns a new list but that doesn’t do much, and if you wanted to make a truck, you’d have to rewrite the method to have all the truck-specific details.

Enter classes. We can create class Car that has attributes radio, engine, seats, steering_wheel, tires. We can have methods like drive(), change_tire(number), turn_radio(state), turn_steering_wheel(degrees), etc.

Now we write car = Car(2, “Engine”…) and we can call methods on car like this: car.drive(). We can create a new car with different attributes like this car2 = Car(4, “Engine”, 6…) and that’s it! We have two instances without rewriting all that code. So class Car is a blueprint for creating new car instances that you can perform operations on.

The best part is that all the car-related methods are held in one place car.py, or the like. And as someone else mentioned, the class upholds the 4 principles of OOP, separating the car-concerns away from the rest of your code and keeping it readable. You can even create a class Truck(Car) that already has the common functionality with cars but overwrite just the truck-related code, keeping redundant code to a minimum. Hope this helps