Perhaps I misunderstand them all but I don´t like this “procedural programming 98% bad” standpoint which is definitely not yours .

Greetings from Germany
Markus

My point however, was more concerned with the approach taken to an OOP project vs a procedural. My post originated from my experiences with a VB.Net application that had been clearly written by someone with a background in VB6/VBA. This took me back to when I was learning AS2 and .net and how I would continually end up creating objects that were essentially acting as holders for massive long procedural functions.

When I went on one of Aral’s courses, he highlighted to me to ditch my procedural approach and start with a clean plate. Everything started to fall into place then. Of course if I needed to carryout conditional statements, loops and other snippets I could do no problem based on my existing knowledge.

I would say planning and building an OOP application vs procedural is about 95% architecture and design and 5% language specific syntax. That’s very ballpark guesstimates but its the principle I’m referring to.

(No problem re: the wallop invite )

thank you very much for sending me an invitation (and so fast).

Greetings

Greetings!

well I personally really can´t agree to this “forget 95%” advice as well as the author of the second link above (“suggested by others”) who classifies Java simpler compared to C++. I´m not a professor or something alike and the only person I´ve teached OOP at this time was myself.
In my opinion you shouldn´t introduce anymore the term of “procedural programming” because this is for me the real confusion in this area. Confusing because there isn´t always anymore a precise borderline between procedural and object-oriented programming.
Take for example JavaScript. You can write little programs with several functions calling each other without using one self-customized object. With my understanding this is like prodedural programming. But where are all these functions located? In the “main-object” of JavaScript. Mhhh a function contained in an object. Other people and me would call this also a method. Is this OOP? Definitifly not! But should somebody for example coming from JavaScript who wants to learn ActionScript 3, Java or C# forget 95% (most) of the “old language”? I say NO! Not only because in this example there are many paralells in syntax, operators and keywords but also because the way of thinking in “procedural programming” is indeed a small subset of thinking in “object-oriented programming”. For me grouping sub-processes together to a function is similar to encapsulation without the data hiding which is one important feature of OOP. And where is the difference between functions using other functions and composition in OOD?
OOP simply provides much more tools for writing better structured and maintainable code.

Both authors of the links contained in this article shouldn´t tell somebody what they have to forget to learn something new. Their problem lies in how to teach it. Lastly to comment something to point 2 of the author of the third link (“more thoroughly investigated”):

“The danger with hybrid languages is that students with prior programming experience in a procedural language are not encouraged to change their style.”
-> This is a lack of the teacher´s competence not a danger coming from hybrid languages!

“… beginning students often believe their work to be finished as soon as the compiler accepts their program.”
-> That´s why there is a teacher. Nobody goes to a course because of the presence of a compiler.

If I would start a course I would ask which candidate has already used or has tried to use OOP / OOD and not telling them first to forget something they have worked arround.

Another last word: I hate this classification “procedural”. Take again JavaScript and search the web if JavaScript is procedural or not:

- Wikipedia says YES
- ECMAScript Lang Specification doesn´t mention this term once (so NO?)
- JavaKicks.com (http://www.javakicks.com/j2ee/JavaScript_can_function_as_procedural_and_an_object_oriented_language)
“JavaScript can function as procedural and an object oriented language” (YES)

Thats why I neither mind anymore about this “procedural” thing nor would I tell somebody …. you guess it!