OOP, the spawn of such terrible and magnificent creatures such as objects (!?!), inheritance, encapsulation, ADTs, etc. But lets focus on object and inheritance. They make sense in theory, right?
"Oh I can just make a 'Chair' object and then my 'Cat' object which is a subclass of my 'Animal' class which really just inherits my 'Atoms' class, can sit on the chair. Easy.
The thing about objects is that you can make anything as long as you can imagine it and think of some basic characteristics of said object. Let's take the chair for example. What are some characteristics of a chair?
It's color, size, shape, material, lethality, etc.
Now, we just create our Chair class and we're done. But wait, what is a class?
A class is just a blueprint for making objects. In this example, it's like a chair factory churning out chairs based on what the customer has asked for (this is specified in the class initializer). The customer can customize the characteristics of the Chair by specifying it's color, size, shape, etc (see above).
So we have our lovely blue chair which is exactly 133.7 cm high, made of out wood and has a lethality rating of 42. But you're not fulfilled yet, you feel an emptiness within. Deep down you wish that there was a chair which can also double up as a boat. With all the determination in the world, you start to build your chair-boat factory, one brick at a time. But we are in an object oriented world. Why build a brand new factory? when we can just inherit the characteristics of a Chair and tweak it so that it floats on water.
We don't want to drive away our regular (sane) customers who just want regular chairs, so we use INHERITANCE. Using inheritance we can create a separate 'Chair-Boat' class which inherits all the characteristics of a chair without changing Chair. Now we can add our own unique code which makes is so that our Chair-Boat can float and move on water. After a lot of hard work, we have a 'Chair-Boat' class.
It does everything a chair can do (comfort our sore feet) as well as give us the thrill of speeding around on the open sea. All without changing our original Chair class. Isn't that just swell? All thanks to the wonders of Object-Oriented Programming.
