For one, undeniably, your teacher made silly restrictions and demands.

Thank you Fastolfe.

I just found this thread and started reading the replies. I find it hard to believe that most people just assume there is no other motive behind this assignment. While it is very possible that the constraints placed on the project are just plain silly, there is also a reasonable chance that there are other lessons being taught.

I have a close, talented friend who flunked out of Carnegie Mellon because he felt he could improve his projects and that his CS profs were "silly" with some of their assignments.

However... It's been quite a while since I've been in school, but one of the things that teachers should be teaching is at least the process of determining what the best solution is to a problem.

It's entirely possible that the assignment was given to force the students to work with OO. But in that case, pick a problem that matches to an OO implementation and don't force busy work on a student just because that's what the lesson plan says.

Now, I'm not saying that there aren't equally silly constraints out in The Real World™. However, those tend to be a different set of silly constraints from school. For example, it's entirely possible (in TRW) to be told that you have to use a particular language or environment because that's what the entire organization is using (or whatever). But "Do it in OO" is rarely one of the real-world constraints. "Make it reusable" may be, but OO-ness, in and of itself, rarely is.

I'd be curious to hear back from the teacher in this instance as to why they put that set of contraints on the student / developer. That may be more instructive than anything else.

The "silly restrictions" referred to things like module length and using different classes for each day. Try as I might, I cannot see any valuable lesson being taught there. I am very well aware of the fact that a lesson to be taught may not be what would under other circumstances have been the optimal solution.

Pay attention: I am not critizing the teacher's choice of restrictions with respect to the problem at hand; I am questioning their worth as such. (Maybe I should have been clearer?)

I am in fact biased towards OO; I would tend to use it in projects that could be done without OO simply because solutions tend to stick around and grow, regardless of how short term they were planned, and I'd rather be working with organic growth in an OO approach than a procedural one.

I am not critizing the teacher's choice of restrictions with respect to the problem at hand; I am questioning their worth as such.

Without knowing what the instructor's goals were with this assignment, I don't know how you can do that. What's a simple way of teaching someone inheritance? Or juggling a half-dozen different object types in an application? Or maybe methods for working with (identifying?) object types when said objects might be used interchangeably? This assignment could fit any of those. The original poster gave us his requirements, but never stated the goal of the exercise.

And if I were teaching an entry-level object-oriented programming course, I would not want to wade through 50 pages of someone's crappy code. I've had CS instructors say, "This probably shouldn't take more than X lines of code to do," but rarely was a size limit strictly imposed, I will agree with that. But I can also see how some instructors might want to do that. That's just a personal decision. This length requirement really doesn't surprise me.

But, alas, this is kind of getting off-topic. Yes, in the real world there are practical and design reasons you may or may not want to go with an OO design. But this isn't a real world: it's an exercise with an unknown goal. "Silly restrictions" should hardly be surprising.