Features, Advantages, and Disadvantages of OOP

Having built up the mechanisms of object-oriented programming, this final lesson steps back to evaluate the paradigm as a whole. What are its defining features, what benefits do they bring to real software projects, what costs do they impose, and how does OOP compare with the older procedural style? Being able to discuss these trade-offs thoughtfully is a common higher-level exam expectation.

The defining features

OOP is usually characterized by four features, all covered in earlier lessons: encapsulation (bundling data with methods and hiding internal detail), inheritance (deriving new classes from existing ones), polymorphism (one interface serving many types), and abstraction (exposing essentials while hiding complexity). These features work together, and their combined effect is what g