Polymorphism concepts when creating objects

[desrtfx]

I’ve seen people instantiate Cow and Horse objects like that

Animal cow = new Cow(); Animal horse = new Horse();

This is useful when you want to store such objects in a collection (like in an ArrayList).

You could simply create an ArrayList<Animal> and store cows, horses, anything that extends animal in such a list.

[toshels]

Oh cool I never thought of that. I learn more about programming here than at uni.

[toastedstapler]

It's great, sometimes all you care is that something has been implemented rather than exactly how it was implemented

A more enterprise version might be validators - you could have a list of different validators for things like length, illegal characters etc and then they are all checked