Out with the Old and in with the New

Out with the Old and in with the New

Darrell J. Bradford

Professor Michael Kolta

CIS 110 Computer Program Design

September 7, 2014

As the needs of computer programming have advance, it is still important to understand the beginnings of programming.  From the 1960s and 70s, procedural programming was the model to use. Languages such as FORTRAN, Pascal, BASIC, and C utilized such a programming style.  The primary purpose of procedural programming is to act as a list of commands that tells a computer what to do step by step.  Here, you run a program, that program runs through its lines of code, and then you get an output.  As a result, one has to keep the data and the operations on the data separate. These steps are contained in a procedure. “The design method used in procedural programming is called Top Down Design.  This is where you start with a problem (procedure) and then systematically break the problem down into sub problems (sub procedures)” (http://www.ctp.bilkent.edu.tr/).  Yet, with procedural programming, it is difficult and time consuming to provide the appropriate maintenance for the software.  Procedural Programming is often known to have a trickle down affect for anything changes made throughout the programming.  By making changes to “main procedure (top), those changes can cascade to the sub procedures of main, and the sub-sub procedures and so on, where the change may impact all procedures in the pyramid” (http://www.ctp.bilkent.edu.tr/).  To combat the complications involved with procedural programming, a new language called object-oriented programming was designed.  

        As one can figure out, the main focal point of object-oriented programming are known as “objects.” Per the Education Portal, “An object is a component of a program that knows how to perform certain actions and how to interact with other elements of the program” (http://education-portal.com/). Many objects can be combined together to create what is known as “class.”  In order for this to happen, the objects must have similar attributes, behaviors, and operations.   This is the first major different between procedural programming (PP) and object-oriented programming (OOP).  With OOP, these objects are able to communicate between each other because class they are assigned to.  In PP, for them to communication, you would have to copy the entire code into another page and then create another page to have the previous pages communication.  Of course, this you are using more data and code making the program much larger than it needs to be.  By using objects, you can reuse the same code repeatedly without having to rewrite it.  This helps with saving development time and cost over the entire project.  Instead of using procedures, OOP uses methods, which will only influence the particular object that is being called upon.