OOP vs Functional Programming vs Procedural

Question

What are the differences between these programming paradigms  and are they better suited to particular problems or do any use-cases favour one over the others   Architecture examples appreciated

User · Answer

I think the available libraries  tools  examples  and communities completely trumps the paradigm these days   For example  ML  or whatever  might be the ultimate all-purpose programming language but if you can t get any good libraries for what you are doing you re screwed   For example  if you re making a video game  there are more good code examples and SDKs in C    so you re probably better off with that   For a small web application  there are some great Python  PHP  and Ruby frameworks that ll get you off and running very quickly   Java is a great choice for larger projects because of the compile-time checking and enterprise libraries and platforms   It used to be the case that the standard libraries for different languages were pretty small and easily replicated - C  C    Assembler  ML  LISP  etc   came with the basics  but tended to chicken out when it came to standardizing on things like network communications  encryption  graphics  data file formats  including XML   even basic data structures like balanced trees and hashtables were left out   Modern languages like Python  PHP  Ruby  and Java now come with a far more decent standard library and have many good third party libraries you can easily use  thanks in great part to their adoption of namespaces to keep libraries from colliding with one another  and garbage collection to standardize the memory management schemes of the libraries

User · Answer

One of my friends is writing a graphics app using NVIDIA CUDA  Application fits in very nicely with OOP paradigm and the problem can be decomposed into modules neatly  However  to use CUDA you need to use C  which doesn t support inheritance  Therefore  you need to be clever   a  You devise a clever system which will emulate inheritance to a certain extent  It can be done   i  You can use a hook system  which expects every child C of parent P to have a certain override for function F  You can make children register their overrides  which will be stored and called when required   ii  You can use struct memory alignment feature to cast children into parents   This can be neat but it s not easy to come up with future-proof  reliable solution  You will spend lots of time designing the system and there is no guarantee that you won t run into problems half-way through the project  Implementing multiple inheritance is even harder  if not almost impossible   b  You can use consistent naming policy and use divide and conquer approach to create a program  It won t have any inheritance but because your functions are small  easy-to-understand and consistently formatted you don t need it  The amount of code you need to write goes up  it s very hard to stay focused and not succumb to easy solutions  hacks   However  this ninja way of coding is the C way of coding  Staying in balance between low-level freedom and writing good code  Good way to achieve this is to write prototypes using a functional language  For example  Haskell is extremely good for prototyping algorithms   I tend towards approach b  I wrote a possible solution using approach a  and I will be honest  it felt very unnatural using that code

User · Answer

All of them are good in their own ways - They re simply different approaches to the same problems   In a purely procedural style  data tends to be highly decoupled from the functions that operate on it   In an object oriented style  data tends to carry with it a collection of functions   In a functional style  data and functions tend toward having more in common with each other  as in Lisp and Scheme  while offering more flexibility in terms of how functions are actually used  Algorithms tend also to be defined in terms of recursion and composition rather than loops and iteration   Of course  the language itself only influences which style is preferred  Even in a pure-functional language like Haskell  you can write in a procedural style  though that is highly discouraged   and even in a procedural language like C  you can program in an object-oriented style  such as in the GTK  and EFL APIs    To be clear  the  advantage  of each paradigm is simply in the modeling of your algorithms and data structures  If  for example  your algorithm involves lists and trees  a functional algorithm may be the most sensible  Or  if  for example  your data is highly structured  it may make more sense to compose it as objects if that is the native paradigm of your language - or  it could just as easily be written as a functional abstraction of monads  which is the native paradigm of languages like Haskell or ML   The choice of which you use is simply what makes more sense for your project and the abstractions your language supports

User · Answer

In order to answer your question  we need two elements    Understanding of the characteristics of different architecture styles patterns  Understanding of the characteristics of different programming paradigms    A list of software architecture styles pattern is shown on the software architecture article on Wikipeida  And you can research on them easily on the web   In short and general  Procedural is good for a model that follows a procedure  OOP is good for design  and Functional is good for high level programming   I think you should try reading the history on each paradigm and see why people create it and you can understand them easily   After understanding them both  you can link the items of architecture styles patterns to programming paradigms

User · Answer

I think that they are often not  versus   but you can combine them   I also think that oftentimes  the words you mention are just buzzwords   There are few people who actually know what  object-oriented  means  even if they are the fiercest evangelists of it

User · Answer

For GUI I d say that the Object-Oriented Paradigma is very well suited  The Window is an Object  the Textboxes are Objects  and the Okay-Button is one too  On the other Hand stuff like String Processing can be done with much less overhead and therefore more straightforward with simple procedural paradigma    I don t think it is a question of the language neither  You can write functional  procedural or object-oriented in almost any popular language  although it might be some additional effort in some

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These paradigms don t have to be mutually exclusive  If you look at python  it supports functions and classes  but at the same time  everything is an object  including functions  You can mix and match functional oop procedural style all in one piece of code   What I mean is  in functional languages  at least in Haskell  the only one I studied  there are no statements  functions are only allowed one expression inside them   BUT  functions are first-class citizens  you can pass them around as parameters  along with a bunch of other abilities  They can do powerful things with few lines of code   While in a procedural language like C  the only way you can pass functions around is by using function pointers  and that alone doesn t enable many powerful tasks   In python  a function is a first-class citizen  but it can contain arbitrary number of statements  So you can have a function that contains procedural code  but you can pass it around just like functional languages   Same goes for OOP  A language like Java doesn t allow you to write procedures functions outside of a class  The only way to pass a function around is to wrap it in an object that implements that function  and then pass that object around   In Python  you don t have this restriction

[oop] OOP vs Functional Programming vs Procedural

Examples related to oop

Examples related to functional-programming

Examples related to paradigms

Examples related to procedural-programming