FAQ: Object-Oriented Programming - OOP Pillar: Abstraction

This community-built FAQ covers the “OOP Pillar: Abstraction” exercise from the lesson “Object-Oriented Programming”.

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This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

Learn Intermediate Python 3

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So, what’s the point of adding an abstract method to the Animal class? Wouldn’t the Cat class throw an error if I called make_noise() and hadn’t defined it there whether the Animal class had the abstract method or not?

2 Likes

I think this pillar is very important, and the narrative just distracts the important points to get from this pillar.

I’m curious about this to. I commented out the @abstractmethod and ran the program with the say_id() in the childclass and it ran just fine. I’m still not sure why I would use the @abstractmethod and not just delete it from the parentclass.

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I am confused as well. I see no point in it and it changes nothing when I just comment it all out in the abstract class. Came to this forum hoping to find an answer but unfortunately there isn’t one.

I don’t think that the whole explanation makes a point. Also I agree that narrative confuses and distracts, like “The .__init__() method still requires a name, since we feel all animals deserve a name.”

An explanation of decorator (@abstractmethod) is clearly explained here: https://blog.teclado.com/python-abc-abstract-base-classes/

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@kimsergeo posted a good link that provides some light on this. From what I can tell, the @abstractmethod decorator allows you to organize your classes by declaring the methods that you want to be apart of the AbstractEmployee subclasses.

If you try to make a method called ‘print_id’ instead of ‘say_id’ within the Employee class it will give you an error. The @abstractmethod allows us to set the name of the methods that we want all of our subclasses to have.

I agree with what has bee said before, this particular lesson could do with a bit more clarity - it is confusing, I needed to do some extra reading outside of codecademy to really understand.