As I learn programming, I find it so interesting that programming languages are called such, as they really mirror the way in which we speak. When I first started learning basic methods, I saw how you can manipulate little pieces of data. For example, when I learnt how to do “puts” and do some math it’s like learning how to read. When you learn the letter “A”, you can point it out in a word and see how it fits into the big picture. You can see - there’s a word that starts with an “A” and there’s another word that has an “A” inside of it. In programming, it’s like having a string; you can see what it starts with and what it ends with, and you can turn it around and count it. This is all really cool when you learn it, but you quickly realize that as cool as it is, it’s really limited in what it can do.
The next step in learning is taking these concepts and building on them. This is the point where you start taking the words and building them into sentences. Now you take the methods and start learning about arrays and hashes, which are collections of data; and you learn how to manipulate them. You are taught how to get information from them and change information inside of them. At this point, you’re able to learn some new methods that work for these things and you learn how to iterate over them. That is an even more powerful method, because now you can do many things with one method and you don’t need to make a specific method for every little thing you do.This is like forming words. It’s not just the letters themselves, it starts to form something bigger where you can have a bunch of words becoming a sentence.
The next thing that we hit is classes; in them you have that much more going on. You take the methods and classes and put them into something bigger. It’s kind of like forming a paragraph. You don’t just have words and sentences, but a full paragraph. When you take a method and put it inside something else, you can then call it in something else and they all work together, so they start to actually mean something.
At the point that we start bringing classes together to work together, it’s like writing a story. You have the classes which contain different pieces of data and methods in them. Then you have different methods within them, each one means something by itself, but it means even more, because you can reference them from outside themselves and they can start interacting with each other. As all the programs working together makes you see how powerful these programs really are.