[Help Needed] Transitioning to Object Oriented Programming

[Foster]

So not to be a stickler for words but "visual programming and object oriented" are two different concepts.

Visual programming would be more drag and drop programming where you don't type code it, you do everything in a graphical environment. Like Scratch, the graphical part of RobotC and Labview.

Object oriented is where your program deals with objects where objects have data and methods associated with them. You invoke the method and it works on that objects data.

Some languages are procedural, so you do things in steps and have functions that you can call.

RobotC Graphical is a procedural visual language.

Scratch is mostly considered a procedural visual language, except you can treat sprites as objects and tell them (invoke their methods) what to do. (Start the flame war in another thread please)

Dataflow languages act on data streams. They models a program as a directed graph of the data flowing between operations. Labview is a dataflow language as is Microsoft Visual Programming Language (part of their Microsoft Robotics Studio.) My primary dataflow language is Verilog for programming chips. What makes dataflow languages interesting is lots of things happen concurrently, not in steps like a procedural language.

But there is a component of Labview that allows you to create objects and do a method invocation.

That leaves Java which is an Object Oriented text based (non-visual) language.

Hope this helps on some definitions. I tried to stay with "robotics" languages, there are dozens of dataflow languages, over 100 OO languages and lots more procedural languages. And some that try to be all things to all people (and fail)

Good luck with your paper!