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2.1. Procedural Programming versus OOP

Procedural programming often emphasizes writing code that is as concise as possible and coding directly for the end result. In other words, most procedural programming uses targeted groups of functions that immediately address the problem at hand—usually nothing more, and nothing less. In most situations, this gets you extremely efficient and high-performance applications. One of the downsides to this approach is a lack of maintainability. If the project grows large enough, the developer or developers could end up having to maintain a large number of individual functions, and in some cases, the logic of different functions can become confusingly similar.

Object-oriented programming (OOP), on the other hand, emphasizes abstract relationships and a hierarchy of related functionality. Similar functionality can all share a common core, making maintenance much easier. Code reuse is increased as well, as you can easily adapt the abstracted base functionality for new tasks. OOP also can aid in large-scale program design, helping encapsulate and categorize the different sets of functionality required by each part of the system. Such organization and modularity can come at a price, however. If your object-oriented system is poorly designed, it can actually be harder to maintain than any of the alternatives. Often, the extreme modularity and "code-heaviness" of object-oriented designs can suffer from poor performance.

Once you get past the problems ...