Can a low-level programmer learn OOP?

[Simon Hibbs]

Chris,

I can fully relate to your post. I trained as a programmer in the 80s
when OOP was an accademic novelty, and didn't learn OOP untill around
2002. However now I find myself naturaly thinking in OOP terms,
although I'm by no means an expert - I'm a sysadmin that writes the
occasional utility. I found learning OOP with Python very easy because
it has such a stripped-down and convenient syntax.

The advantages of OOP aren't in performance or memory, they're in the
fact that OOP simplifies the ways in which we can think about and
solve a problem. OOP packages up the functionality of a program into
logical units (objects) which can be written, debugged and maintained
independently of the rest of the programme almost as if they were
completely seperate programmes of their own, with their own data and
'user inteface' in the form of callable functions (actualy methods).

Here's a realy excellent tutorial on Python that's fun to follow.
Downloading and installing python, and following this tutorial will
probably take about as long as it took to write your post in the first
place. At the end of it you'll have a good idea how OOP works, and how
Python works. Learning OOp this way is easy and painless, and what you
learn about the theory and principles of OOP in Python will be
transferable to C++ if you end up going in that direction.

I hope this was helpful.

Simon Hibbs