Toxi has posted a follow-up to last week’s discussion about where Processing falls short with a post on the importance of design in programming. He goes a bit into OOP theory and discusses why he thinks good programming practice is an important part of producing expressive code. It’s a good short read for people who aren’t scared of words like ‘polymorphism’ and ‘inheritence’.

I teach OOP to beginning programmers and I think I do a fairly good job of it. Still, when it gets down to the nitty gritty of it, concepts like interfaces and inheritance can be a bit tough to swallow. Mind you, programming in general can be tricky for beginners, and I’m not convinced that OOP makes it any harder. In fact, in a lot of ways, I think it makes things a little bit smoother, since you can very quickly learn to recognize patterns in code that act as landmarks of a sort. Particularly with ActionScript, I find that understanding the Object Model takes some of the mystery out of code for new users.