I recently interviewed for a lead developer role at Lab Digital¹ and thought it would be sensible to review some of the fundamental aspects of Object Orientated Programming (OOP).

You might think that's a unusual way to prepare for an interview, and you'd be right. Nothing close to these notes arose during the interview, but I find this stuff interesting. If I'm motivated enough to study it, then I think that's a good enough reason by itself, without a specific reason. These are some brief notes.

Object Orientated Programming has four key aspects:

1. Encapsulation (Hiding information)
2. Abstraction (Hiding the implementation)
3. Inheritance
4. Polymorphism

1. Encapsulation

• Each object keeps its state private, inside a class.
• Instance variables/properties/attributes are kept private and accessor methods are made public.
• Other objects don’t have direct access to this state. They can only call a list of public functions (methods).
• The object manages its own state via methods, no other class can touch it unless explicitly (not default) allowed.
• Private variables.
• Public methods.
• You can define classes within classes, and functions within functions.

2. Abstraction

• A natural extension of encapsulation
• A concept or idea that is not associated with any particular instance.
• Expresses the intent of the class, rather than a specific implementation.
• Programs are often extremely large and separate objects communicate with each other a lot. This makes maintaining large programs difficult, and abstraction tries to solve this.
• Applying abstraction means that each object should only expose a high-level mechanism for using it.
  • This mechanism should hide internal implementation details. It should only reveal operations relevant for the other objects.
  • This mechanism should be easy to use and should rarely change over time.
• Implementation changes — for example, a software update — rarely affect the abstraction you use.
• e.g. a coffee machine. It does a lot of stuff and makes quirky noises under the hood. But all you have to do is put in coffee and press a button.

3. Inheritance

• In OOP, objects are often similar, sharing similar logic. But they are not 100% the same.
• Create a (child) class by deriving from another (parent) class. This way, we form a hierarchy.
• child class reuses all fields and methods of the parent class (common part) and can implement its own unique part using method or attribute overloading.

4. Polymorphism

• Gives a way to use a class exactly like its parent so there’s no confusion with mixing types. But each child class keeps its own methods as they are.
• This typically happens by defining a (parent) interface to be reused. It outlines a bunch of common methods. Then, each child class implements its own version of these methods.
• Any time a collection (such as a list) or a method expects an instance of the parent (where common methods are outlined), the language takes care of evaluating the right implementation of the common method — regardless of which child is passed.

I'd like to be so familiar with the following features that I can use them without referring to notes:

1. Getters and setters.
2. Instance methods compared to class methods.
3. Inheritance, mixins, and decorators.
4. The "magic" within the Django source code that requires mypy to use extensions in order to do its static type checking correctly.