End of Week 4

Well, this post is supposed to mention my specific impressions about a personal impression about the use of the Object Oriented features of Ruby, and if it felt any different from a more direct, procedural approach.

Well, I passed through this week's assignments without that much difficulty, mainly because OOP in Ruby is what I was studying before coming to Launch Academy, and since OOP involves a lot of concepts that I'm now kinda familiar with,  I only had to worry about implementing classes instead of trying to understand all the concepts behind them. I guess that OOP is more useful for bigger projects instead of small stuff; it has been around since the 70's if I'm not mistaken but only became a trend on the industry around the mid 90's, when the software sector (and the size of the software used on products) was growing exponentially.

I was told that OOP design is a little more subjective than a procedural approach and this becomes clear when trying to implement a class.  Finding the best approach, how many classes to build, how many methods, which methods, wheter or not an attribute will be readable/writeable/both, these are all very context-sensitive and a lot of things must be taken into consideration; I imagine that selecting which attributes would be writeable is specially important for security issues as well.

Even though I don't see OOP as 'fundamental' for any of the activities which required to implement classes so far, I guess that when we start working with Rails the OOP approach will be way more desirable since Rails tend to get a little confusing sometimes and a file to store working methods and attributes would be specifically useful in that situation.