lies about OOP

[Paul Robson]

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 19:33:25 -0800, projecktzero wrote:

> A co-worker considers himself "old school" in that he hasn't seen the
> light of OOP.(It might be because he's in love with Perl...but that's
> another story.) He thinks that OOP has more overhead and is slower than
> programs written the procedural way. I poked around google, but I don't
> know the magic words to put in to prove or disprove his assertion. Can
> anyone point me toward some resources?

Oh, he's probably telling the truth, in that unless you have the type of
an object defined at run time then a straight procedural call is going to
be quicker, because classic "procedural" code has a very tight mapping to
the underlying hardware.

Of course, the issue is not about raw speed - which in many cases does not
matter (and the few where it does you can work around) ; it's about
maintainability, modularity and so on.

I once worked at a place (this would be mid 1980s) where the other coders
would not accept that it was "better" to use names for subroutines such as
CalculateBillingTotal or variables such as StaffName. The argument was
"well, gosub 13000 and S$ are the same thing" .... which misses the point.

If he's that obsessed speed what is he doing coding with Perl (hell I like
Perl) which is compiled to a bytecode which is then interpreted.... why
not code in 'C' or even Assembler, then it'll be really quick ? Answer ;
you like the facilities of the language. So it is a trade off.