Recently I’ve been creating some training courses for engineers, one of which deals with OO. I’ve obviously been reading the standard texts and poking around the ‘tinternet for inspiration and I came across what, to me at least, seemed a curious concept.
It’s a slide in a deck that is introducing the concept of class vs. instances. As well as the usual stuff it goes on to say that a class is ‘a factory that creates instances’. Now I guess I can just about convince myself what the author meant by this but to be honest I really can’t see this as a useful way of understanding the class/instance concept so I’m curious to see if anybody else thinks of it in this light. I certainly won’t be going down this path because all I can foresee is confusion when I start talking about Factory patterns in the Design Patterns course the following day.
Still, life would be dull if we all thought the same.
