I came across the analogy of the class being a cookie cutter and the cookies being objects while reading Code Complete. I fail to see why this analogy was drawn.How is it related to the concept of objects being run time instances of their classes?
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The analogy is a bad one, because it can convey the essence of classes and objects if you apply the right mental mapping, but that mapping is not obvious to arrive at, and perhaps not even the most convincing one.
A class is like a cookie-cutter in that it has the power to create multiple items that are alike in some ways: they all have the same number and type of fields, while their values can differ. You can compare this to all cookies having the same shape, but it is unclear how the differences between individual cookies map to the differences between objects that are class-mates; in my mind, two Cartesian coordinates with different X and Y values are much more different than similar, certainly much less alike than two cookies with the same shape.
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