Object Oriented Programming is a fundamental concept in Python, empowering developers to build modular, maintainable, and scalable applications. By understanding the core OOP principles—classes, objects, inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, and abstraction—programmers can leverage the full potential of Python’s OOP capabilities to design elegant and efficient solutions to complex problems.
A class is a collection of objects. A class contains the blueprints or the prototype from which the objects are being created. It is a logical entity that contains some attributes and methods.
In object oriented programming Python, The object is an entity that has a state and behavior associated with it. It may be any real-world object like a mouse, keyboard, chair, table, pen, etc. Integers, strings, floating-point numbers, even arrays, and dictionaries, are all objects. More specifically, any single integer or any single string is an object. The number 12 is an object, the string “Hello, world” is an object, a list is an object that can hold other objects, and so on. You’ve been using objects all along and may not even realize it.
Inheritance allows us to define a class that inherits all the methods and properties from another class. Parent class is the class being inherited from, also called base class. Child class is the class that inherits from another class, also called derived class.
In object oriented Programming Python, Polymorphism simply means having many forms. For example, we need to determine if the given species of birds fly or not, using polymorphism we can do this using a single function.
Encapsulation is one of the fundamental concepts in object-oriented programming (OOP). It describes the idea of wrapping data and the methods that work on data within one unit. This puts restrictions on accessing variables and methods directly and can prevent the accidental modification of data. To prevent accidental change, an object’s variable can only be changed by an object’s method. Those types of variables are known as private variables.
Data abstraction is one of the most essential concepts of Python OOPs which is used to hide irrelevant details from the user and show the details that are relevant to the users. For example, the readers of geeksforgeeks only know that a writer can write an article on geeksforgeeks, and when it gets published readers can read the articles but the reader is not aware of the background process of publishing the article.