Today I cracked up some heads to poor in some OO thinking.  A number of daring lads and lassies (youngest with +12y Cobol programming experience) sent off by their boss to this day of "OO introduction and awareness" and to next week's Java intro, heard me introduce OO concepts, place UML diagrams, and tell (hopefully eye-opening) "why OOP" stories.

In every case the "why UML" didn't come out as the classic "a picture says more then a thousand words" cliche... I found myself prooving how pictures succeeded at doing this in terms of exploiting 2 dimensions in stead of only one in the case of the classic sequence of words...

Actually this was triggered by a student's question: "Where in the [class-]diagram do I start reading?"  A sure primer in my training experience to date... Hiding my astonishment I responded with a question (a decoy technique that is one of my favourites in the list of tips-and-tricks-for-bluffing-your-way-out-at-seminars, another one being pretending you have a big list of tips, but you never get past the second one, by then nobody remembers anyway) 

In every case here is my counter-question:  "If you look around in the big world (e.g. when driving your car), where do you start looking/scanning the image?" 

It bought me enough time (and already even satisfied nodding students) to produce: "It's often a good idea to start off with the thing that has the most lines to it, that's often the leading role in the story that diagram wants to tell." (personally I would find myself writing my diagrams in such a way that these are placed in the top-middle to centre of the diagram's rectangle, wondering if that actually matches human's common optical-interest-hot-spot)

The 2D story idea surely triggered some memory-synaps. Check out the picture diary of ex-colleague Karen.  Actually knowing how she *lives* Color.  I would guess she would credit 'color' with at least one more dimension in story telling...