Comparison of Object-Oriented and Functional Programming Paradigms in Software Design

Abstract

This article describes two types of paradigms – object-oriented and functional paradigms. Paradigm stands for a style and an approach to perform any kind of coding activities. Relevance of usage for each of them as well as their differences and benefits were analyzed. Regardless of ever-changing tendencies in popularity of both paradigms it is impossible to acknowledge any of them to deprecate another one. Although object-oriented programming as well as functional programming are essential in their approaches they have the same goal – to make comprehensive programs without possible mistakes. OOP follows imperative programming model which is based on a set of primitives the given language provides. Functional paradigm is intertwined with declarative style which imply what is to be done, but not how to do it. We may come to conclusion that the consensus is that object oriented paradigm and functional paradigm can be effective in a peculiar situation. Therefore, developers are to choose and pick the programming paradigm for a given task to make a process as simple and productive as it can be. Object-oriented programming languages are a good choice when you have a fixed set of operations on things and you add new things for your code to evolve. You can achieve it by adding new classes that implement existing methods while existing classes remain the same. Functional languages may be a better choice if you have a fixed set of things and you add new operations on existing things for your code to evolve. You can achieve it by adding new functions which are to be computed with existing data types while existing functions remain the same. Object-oriented programming as well as functional programming has its place in modern approaches to software development. Meanwhile the functional programming is being reconsidered and used much more often due to Big Data Technologies while object-oriented programming remains popular to perform representation of real-life objects in the code.