ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Interface-based programming

Okay kiddo, have you ever played with toy cars or dolls? Imagine you have a toy car and a toy garage. The car has wheels and the garage has a door that opens and closes. Now, what if you could make any toy car fit into any toy garage as long as the car has wheels and the garage has a door?

This is kind of like what interface-based programming is! In programming, there are things called interfaces that are like a set of rules or expectations for how different parts of the program should work together. Just like how the toy car needs wheels and the toy garage needs a door, certain parts of a program need certain things in order to work correctly. An interface is like a checklist that says "if you want to work with me, you need to have these things."

For example, let's pretend we are building a game where the player can move around a character. There might be different parts of the program that need to interact with the character's movement: the keyboard input, the animation, the sound effects when the character moves, and so on. To make sure everything works together smoothly, we can use interfaces.

Each part of the program would have its own interface, like "IKeyboardInput," "IAnimation," and "ISoundEffects." These interfaces would specify what kinds of functions and methods the different parts of the program need in order to work together. For example, the IKeyboardInput interface might say "you need to have a function that gets the player's input for moving left, and a function that gets the player's input for moving right." The animation interface might say "you need to have a function that takes in the player's movement and outputs a corresponding animation."

By using interfaces, the different parts of our program can "talk" to each other and work together, even if they were made by different programmers or in different programming languages. As long as each part of the program "checks off" all the items on its interface checklist, it can work with any other part of the program that also uses that interface. It's kind of like how any toy car with wheels can fit into any toy garage with a door - as long as they meet each other's requirements, they can work together seamlessly!

I hope that helps you understand interface-based programming a little better, kiddo!
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