Search the Community

I've started a project as a way of transitioning from task-based to object-oriented programming. So far, I wish I'd put the effort in sooner. OOP solves a lot of problems I spent frustrating hours considering ways to get around. Platitudes aside, I want to make sure I'm making the right choices as I learn, so that the right practices are in place beginning early in the process. I favor a hierarchical architecture similar to what's been discussed in other topics on the board, and an observation I've made as I write is that much of the code falls into two categories: abstraction layers and mediators. There are both general similarities (queues in and out, auto/manual mode, etc.) and functional differences (power supply vs. multimeter vs. stepper motor), which spawned a thought and a series of questions. I'm considering building a class for a parent abstraction layer and/or a class for a parent mediator, then inheriting as needed. What pitfalls or advantages might I have missed? Will I discover as my skills progress that I've imposed a need for work-arounds? Or, if I'm careful to keep the parent classes away from anything application-specific, will it provide a good base to my coding that can be managed by version control?